The Search Warrant by Patrick Modiano

 Someone may be boring, it may not be deliberate but is something of their makeup as a person that they are undoubtedly boring.  Such boredom may be so extreme that it could constitute as an attack.  This is the boredom I have found in Patrick Modiano’s The Search Warrant, a short book that was hard to get in England as his books are not normally translated into English.  A fact that, after winner the Nobel Prize, must surely change.

   

The novella is about searching for another person’s story, uncovering a person’s movements, maybe even their thoughts at that time, as a way of finding your own story.  The narrator, apparently Modiano himself, found a notice in the Paris Soir about a girl named Dora Bruder, age 15, who in 1941 disappeared.  A decade long survey into the girl is the content of the book.

  

 When I say I found boredom in this book I was not, necessarily, bored by the book.  More that I found that the boredom of the dry facts of the case of a girl, who escapes the convent she was attending and ends up in the concentration camps of those times for being a Jew, was telling me something.  That it was best to surround the material in boredom as a way of stifling the pain the story brought to the author.

  

 The book eventually hinges on the time when Dora goes on the streets during the winter months of which there is no record of her being anywhere from one end of the season to the other.  Where she was or what she was doing is a complete mystery and it’s one that haunts Modiano as he agonises about his own family and his own future.  The completeness of her disappearance during that time is I think a symbol of the indigestible nature of the holocaust and as how, Martin Aims has discovered in his new book, Primo Levi says that we do not need to try to understand it in it’s totality.

  In the middle of the book there is the account of the German writer Fredo Lampe and his book Am Rande der Nacht, which Modiano describes:

‘For me, name and title evoked those lighted windows from which you cannot tear your gaze.  You are convinced that, behind them, somebody whom you have forgotten has been awaiting your return for years, or else that there is no longer anybody there.  Only a lamp, left burning in the empty room.’

Perhaps Modiano is waiting for a return to the years of innocence, that where once proclaimed to be the time before poetry was killed, but that hope is as empty as the room.  The lamp in the empty room encapsulates what the writer himself has on occasion felt, an emptiness that has to fill itself up with research, research into another human being to be able to pull himself out the cold numbness that was possibly a symptom of the times.  How soon after this did Jean-Paul Sarte write Nausea?

   

For most of the book I was unconvinced about it.  Just what was it?  With it’s detail to place names I kidded myself into thinking that it was a book like what W.G. Sebald would write.  And really that’s not a bad way of looking at it.  It is about specific places, and it is about documentation and it is about how the memory of an event can either be magnified and remembered forever or how even big events can be difficult to recall.  This book is a type of psycho-geography mapping out not only French cities but aspects of the human heart and it’s grief.  In this book Modiano does not only generalise a horrofic event but he details an individual life that was plucked out and cut short, a story from thousands of maybe similar and not so similar people as Dora Brunder.  What is this strange ability for us to pick out a single person amidst wholesale human tragedy and to mourn for those which we have not met.

The last paragraph is great and convinced me of the book’s worth.  It is such an ending that makes me see why Modiano was picked to be this year’s winner.  I would like to read more of him, so I wonder if any of my loyal readers would be good enough to get me Ring Roads for Christmas?  It would be most appreciated.