Category Archives: Novella

I received an advanced review copy of this book from Yale University Press through NetGalley. This book is the compilation of three French novellas that have been translated into English by Mark Polizzotti.

My Review:

I love to review short stories as well as longer works of fiction.  These three stories by Patrick Modiano occupy the space somewhere between a short story and a full length work of fiction.  This collection of stories, or novellas, are all set in Paris in the mid-twentieth century.  They are all told from a first person point of view and are a bit rambling, almost as if they were the diaries or personal memoirs of the narrator in each story.  The narratives jump from place to place and back and forth between different periods of time.  It can be hard to keep track of where the author is trying to lead us.  The tone of these tales are also very brooding, sad and even melancholy.

In the first novella, “Afterimage,” a woman meets a famous photographer while she is at a café in Paris.  The photographer, whose name is Jansen, is an eccentric genius who eventually withdraws from the rest of the world.  The narrator has volunteered to catalog his vast array of photographs which lay in old trunks in his studio.  Jansen calls her “scribe” and she observes the odd habits of the artist until one day he completely drops out of sight, never to be heard from again.  As the woman gets older and her own life seems unfulfilled, she begins to understand Jansen’s choice of disappearing.

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