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the complete review - fiction

Afterimage

by
Patrick Modiano

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

A- : beautiful little piece

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "Mr Modiano’s pared-down prose seems to have less in common with Proust’s sinuous sentences than with the American Noir novels that inspired his early work." - The Economist
  
  
• "Die Flüchtigkeit und Zufälligkeit menschlicher Begegnungen sind seit langem ein zentrales Thema für Patrick Modiano. In diesem Roman hat er zu einer fragilen Darstellung gefunden, die kleine Momentaufnahmen wie in einem Fotoalbum aneinanderreiht und auf die ordnende Hand eines souverän über den Dingen stehenden Chronisten verzichtet. Diese Zurückhaltung zeugt von Übung und Erfahrung." - Sabine Doering, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
  
  
• "Modiano is a pure original. He has transformed the novel into a laboratory for producing atmospheres, not situations -- where everything must be inferred and nothing can be proved." - Adam Thirlwell, The Guardian
  
  
• "(P)eople and places once lost are made to live again, though faintly and flickering, as in an old print of a film noir (.....) Modiano is as accessible as he is engrossing." - Jonathan Gibbs, The Independent
  
  
• "For Modiano, memory, experience are fluid, fleeting, and even the stories we tell ourselves are subject to change. Our lives flicker past us like the afterimage of a photo; eventually, our attempts at constancy must fall away." - David L. Ulin, The Los Angeles Times
  
  
• "(T)hese novellas have a mood. They cast a spell, one that I was mostly happy to submit to. They are wittier than you might imagine. " - Dwight Garner, The New York Times
  
  
• "Desamparo, dolor, silencio: he aquí el fascinante mundo novelístico de Patrick Modiano." - José Luis de Juan, El País
  
  
• "(T)he tautest, most affecting work, is a shadowy tale in which a young writer obsessively catalogs the work of a haunted photographer who "did everything he could to be forgotten."" - Publishers Weekly
  
  
• "The most focused of the book’s three diffuse novellas is Afterimage. (...) Afterimage memorably evokes the solidarity they form around this shared vulnerability." - Scott Esposito, San Francisco Chronicle
  
  
• "Modiano’s Paris is beautiful, baleful, disappearing. Particular places recur with unshakeable atmospheres." - Ruth Scurr, The Spectator
  
  
• "Inspired by Jansen, the young writer of Afterimage undertakes to capture absence. This challenge lies at the core of Modiano’s art. The subtlety and deceptive simplicity of his prose are difficult to translate." - Henri Astier, Times Literary Supplement
  
  
• "In Mark Polizzotti’s spare and elegant translation, the writing conveys a sense of dreamy unease in which the real, the hypothesized and the half-forgotten blend into a shimmering vagueness." - Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
  
  
• "Above all, through these strobe-lit memories Modiano gradually evokes the melancholy of things lost and gone forever." - Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
  
  
• "Eine kostbare, traurige Erzählung." - Susanne Meyer, Die Zeit

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Afterimage is a short novella -- originally published as a stand-alone in French (and German translation), but collected with two earlier novellas in Suspended Sentences in English translation. The first-person narrator -- the same age as Modiano, and also a writer -- looks back nearly three decades, to 1964, when he was nineteen and he spent some time with a photographer who had been a friend of Robert Capa, Francis Jansen.
       Jansen is already an elusive presence in the short time the young narrator knows him. His suitcases are packed -- with twenty-five-years' worth of photographs --, and he's ready to abandon Paris. Even as he then lets the narrator spend time at his studio, he is already absent for much of the time, and when he's in the studio he is unwilling to answer the door or the telephone.
       The narrator describes Jansen's philosophy, which he now seems to be adopting for his private life even more effectively than he had for his professional one:

     He thought a photographer was nothing, that he should blend into the surroundings and become invisible

I had taken on this job because I refused to accept that people and things could disappear without a trace. How could anyone resign himself to that ?

     The more I remember these details, the more I adopt Jansen's point of view. In the few weeks when I knew him, he considered people and things from a great distance, and all that remained for him were vague reference points and hazy silhouettes.

- M.A.Orthofer, 6 November 2014

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Links:

• Yale University Press publicity page
• Seuil publicity page
• Points publicity page
• Aufbau publicity page
• Quiet Resonance: Translating Patrick Modiano by Mark Polizzotti at Yale Books Unbound
• Q & A with translator Mark Polizzotti at Shelf Awareness

• B & N Review
• El Cultural (Spanish)
• The Economist
• Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (German)
• Göteborgs-Posten (Swedish)
• The Guardian
• The Independent
• Je dis ce que j'en sens (Spanish)
• Lecture/Ecriture (French)
• Die Leselust (German)
• The Los Angeles Times
• The New Republic
• Página|12 (Spanish)
• El País (Spanish)
• Publishers Weekly
• San Francisco Chronicle
• The Scotsman
• The Spectator
• Spiked
• Three Guys One Book
• Vertigo
• The Washington Post
• Die Zeit (German) (scroll down for review)
• Zone Critique (French)

• Nobel Prize in Literature, 2014
• Patrick Modiano at books and writers

• After the Circus
• Flowers of Ruin
• Honeymoon
• In the Café of Lost Youth
• La Place de l'Étoile
• Little Jewel
• The Night Watch
• The Occupation Trilogy: see also La Place de l'Étoile, The Night Watch, and Ring Roads
• Paris Nocturne
• Pedigree
• Ring Roads
• Sleep of Memory
• So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood
• Sundays in August
• Suspended Sentences

• See Index of French literature
• See Index of Books by Nobel laureates under review
• Other books from Yale University Press - The Margellos World Republic of Letters under review

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About the Author:

       French author Patrick Modiano was born in 1945. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2014.

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© 2014-2021 the complete review

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