The Modiano titles that I’ve read so far, Little Jewel, Suspended Sentences, and this latest novel published by Yale University Press, all have a mysterious yet emotionally languid quality to them. It is both odd and compelling to mix these tones in a narrative but the author does it, quite successfully, in all three of these books.
Such Fine Boys describes a French boarding school for boys in the mid-twentieth century. Modiano’s description of The Valvert School in the first few pages of the book is strange and even a bit dark:
The Valvert School For Boys occupied the former property of a certain Valvert, who had been an intimate of the comte d’Artois and accompanied him into exile under the Revolution. Later, as an officer in the Russian army, he fell at the Battle of Austerlitz, fighting against his own countrymen in the uniform of the Izmailovsky Regiment. All that remained of him was his name and a pink marble colonnade, now half ruined, at the back of the park. My schoolmates and I were raised under that man’s morose tutelage, and perhaps some of us, without realizing it, still bear the traces.
The fourteen chapters in Such Fine Boys each contain a different story about a boy who attended the school. The young men that attend Valvert come from wealthy, aloof families who don’t have very much time to spend with their children and as a result they become melancholy, feckless adults. Most of the stories are told from the first person point-of-view by a man who is a former student at the school named Patrick. The author shares more than a name with his protagonist since Modiano also spent most of his young life in a French boarding school and saw very little of his parents. Another oddity of the novel is that two of the stories are told by a different narrator, another former student named Edmond who becomes a minor actor in a traveling theater troupe.
The narrator’s interaction with each of the boys at Valvert is overshadowed by a mysterious set of circumstances. A boy named Michel Karve, for example, is described as having a cold and formal relationship with his parents who don’t visit very often. Even though Michel’s parents are wealthy, the boy wears badly fitting clothes and is fed simple meals while his parents dine out with friends. Michel sends the narrator to his parent’s apartment to retrieve his few belongings and never wants to have anything to do with his parents again. As is typical in all fourteen vignettes in the book, the narrative raises many questions about Michel’s circumstances that are never fully explained.
The chapter that best illustrates the languid tone of Modiano’s stories is the one which describes an old schoolmate named Alain Charell. When the narrator meets Alain by chance at the Gare du Nord he reminisces about the boy he knew at school: “What had become of his parents? His father, with his saffron-yellow hair and mustache, looked like a major in the Indian Colonial forces. Had they disappeared, like their lawn and their Trianon? I didn’t dare ask.” Alain and his wife, Suzanne, have a bizarre open marriage and have sex with random strangers while the other spouse listens in the next room. They both seem to take quite a few drugs and one night, in particular, Suzanne suffers from the affects of whatever substance they are ingesting as she must be held up and taken to the restroom by her husband.
One night while the narrator is sleeping he receives a startling phone call from Alain who insists that he and his wife must see him. Alain says on the phone, “Come right away. It’s urgent.” When the narrator arrives at a brassiere, no details about the importance of such a sudden meeting are given; they sit for a while in the crowded restaurant and they eventually take a walk around the deserted city. The only word I could think of to describe these bizarre events and the tone with which they are conveyed is languid, unexpectedly languid:
After a while, Suzanne rested her head on my shoulder. They surely didn’t want me to leave, and I suddenly thought we might spend the entire night on this bench. On the other side of the empty street, from a tarpaulin-covered truck with its lights out, two men in black leather jackets were unloading sacks of coal with rapid, furtive movements, as if on the sly.
What was so urgent that the narrator was suddenly woken out of a sound sleep? Why didn’t he ask his friends these questions immediately? Perhaps, once again, it is something he didn’t dare ask.
Trevor at “The Mookse and the Gripes” has also reviewed this title as well as Modiano’s other latest release, Sundays in August: http://mookseandgripes.com/reviews/2017/08/30/patrick-modiano-such-fine-boys/
The plot of Stern’s novel in which an older man who has a love affair with a younger woman and divorces his wife, could have easily turned into the typical, hackneyed plot that such a book often veers towards. Stern’s intelligent writing delves into the nuances and complications of marriage, middle age, physical attraction and love. The story astutely and sensitively makes us aware of the sacrifices and heartache that each party in this complicated, all-to-human situation suffer. “Love,” Stern writes, “Famous, frozen word concealing how many thousand feelings, the origin of so much story and disorder.”
Suah’s greatest strength as a writer lies in her ability to take what at first appears to be disjointed images and scenes and weave them together into a singularly beautiful story. The attic room, the poetry, the woman on the platform he longs to kiss are all connected in her character’s mind with a meditation on time and space: “When was it that he had last kissed a woman so ardently, his lips as passionate as when they pronounced poetry? In that city or this, at the house of his acquaintance or on the platform in the north station, while waiting for the train.”
Adua, written by the Somali, Italian author Igiaba Scego and translated by Jamie Richards, moves among three different time periods and two different settings. The main character, Adua, emigrates from Somalia to Italy and her own story is a mix of her current, unhappy life and flashbacks to her childhood in Somalia. The third thread in the book deals with the protagonist’s father and his time spent as a servant for a rich Italian who is part of the Italian attempt at colonialism in East Africa just before World War II. My issue with the book is that I wanted more details about Adua and her father but the plot was too brief to provide the depth of plot and characterization that I craved. The author could have easily turned this story into three large volumes about Adua’s childhood, her father, and her adult life as an immigrant in Italy. Adua did prompt me to research and learn more about Italian colonialism in the 20th century but other than that I didn’t have strong feelings about the title after I finished it.
Late Fame, written by Arthur Schnitzler and translated by Alexander Starritt, involves an episode in the life of an older man named Eduard Saxberger who is suddenly reminded of a collection of poetry entitled Wanderings that he had written thirty years earlier and has long forgotten. A group of Viennese aspiring writers stumble upon Saxberger’s volume in a second hand bookshop and invite him to join their literary discussions at a local café. Saxberger, although he never married or had a family, considers his life as a civil servant very successful. The young poets, whom Schnitzler satirizes as bombastic and overly self-important, stage an evening of poetry readings and drama at which event Saxberger is invited to participate. Saxberger learns that although it is nice to get a little bit of late fame and recognition from this ridiculous group of writers, he made the correct decision in pursuring a different career. Trevor at Mookse and The Gripes has written a much better review of this book than I could have done and I highly encourage everyone to read his thoughts: 
Party Going by Henry Green describes exactly what the title suggests: a group of British upper class men and women are attempting to get to a house party in France but are stuck at the train station in London because of thick fog. Green’s narrative starts out on a rather humorous note as he describes these ridiculously fussy, British youth. They panic with what Green calls “train fever” every time they think they are in danger of missing their train. They fret over their clothes, their accessories, their luggage, their tea and their baths. As the story progresses they become increasingly mean and petty towards one another which made me especially uncomfortable. The men are portrayed as idiots and dolts who are easily manipulated by the vain and churlish women. In the end I found Green’s characters so unpleasant that I couldn’t write an entire post about them. I’ve read and written some words about his novels Back and Blindness both of which I thoroughly enjoyed. I still intend to read all of the reissues of his books from the NYRB Classics selections even though I wasn’t thrilled with Party Going.
The Book Binder's Daughter 