His book, a nugget in which he waltzes with time.

Always the same book?

He is sometimes accused of always writing the same thing. Nostalgia, postwar and company. That's when we have not read it, or not really. Are we going to reproach Marcel Proust for not suddenly looking like Emile Zola? Like any great author, Patrick Modiano has his world, he makes us visit from all angles, and we are each time happy about this new journey, never quite
the same. In Sleeping Memories, he follows the trail of six women in his younger years then lost sight of. Six particular women, with rather mysterious trajectories. So it's good Modiano, with its usual dose of strangeness and threat deaf, but Modiano again in the choice of characters and their history.

Eternal young man

The sixties, his zesty obsession. He was young, handsome, tall (1.98 m) ... But not yet the great writer who silently made his sense of observation and his life almost orphan (father absent, with shady activities, and mother actress pulling the devil by the tail and confiding his son to whoever wanted it). In his years as a teenager and then a young adult, he met women, of course. By remembering today the most remarkable, trying to reconstruct the puzzle of these moments and their unusual personality, the author is at the limits of the crime novel and poetry. Some are attracted to the paranormal and inculcate the taste, another has killed a man and asks for his help. But with which layer does it lie?

Very or too modest?

Too much, will decide those who endure badly not to know whether or not he sleeps with it, that he accompanies several times to his hotel, or that one, that he seems not to leave ... Because on this universal subject, motus. The man is mute, letting us advance in his story without this precious information. It is not forbidden to guess, but still ... And Modiano leaves us all the more on hot coals that, of these six women, he does not even tell us, in the absence of explicit sexuality, whether he has them beloved. Yet this ordeal he imposes on us has something
delicious ... Soft artistic hints, barely suggested hints, sensuality between the lines: Modiano at the best.

And then, what to think?

Okay, he has his modesty, sometimes surprising but allowing pruning to get to the point, and of course his tics: extreme "anxiousnessantophilia" narration proceeding in bits and mists, and his mania addresses and "what This corner reminds me "and others" I know this building ", ginned over the walks that structure this book ... beautiful. Well, that's it, it's said. In the tradition of all his novels, from the Place de l'Etoile to So you do not lose yourself in the neighborhood through the Rue des boutiques obscures, here are the "mysteries of Paris" of a new genre, where the watermark a permanent suspense avoids the impasse of nostalgia and crimped the jewel with a strange and offbeat femininity.

"Sleeping Memories" by Patrick Modiano, ed. Gallimard, € 14.50.