Ballerina - Patrick Modiano

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Ballerina

by
Patrick Modiano

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

Title:	Ballerina
Author:	Patrick Modiano
Genre:	Novel
Written:	2023 (Eng. 2025)
Length:	101 pages
Original in:	French
Availability:	Ballerina - US
	Ballerina - UK
	Ballerina - Canada
	La danseuse - Canada
	La danseuse - France
	Die Tänzerin - Deutschland

	from: Bookshop.org (US)

	directly from:

French title: La danseuse
Translated by Mark Polizzotti

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Our Assessment:

B : fine if familiar Modianoesque pirouettes and ambience

See our review for fuller assessment.

Review Summaries
Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
Le Monde	.	8/10/2023	Denis Cosnard
TLS	.	1/3/2024	Amanda Dennis

From the Reviews:

"The author writes in his characteristically fragmentary, nonchronological vignettes. And in characteristic Modiano fashion La Danseuse insists that the past is recoverable; its conclusion celebrates an "eternal present". (...) The tension between a past full of mystery and uncertainty, and a present levelled by the identical backpacks and roller suitcases of tourists, drives and energizes this compelling novel." - Amanda Dennis, Times Literary Supplement

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:

In Ballerina Patrick Modiano turns yet again to his days of young adulthood, when he was still trying to find some hold and purpose. He sums it up as: "the most uncertain period of my life" and once again, in present-day Paris -- now: "a city so changed that it no longer contained any memories for me" -- finds chapters and figures from this past catching up with him: "images began coming back to me, in snatches, from a long-distant period of my life".
Adrift, the young narrator found in the unnamed ballerina of the title someone who suggested possible ways forward, the discipline that dance required and that she devoted to it inspiring him:

I do believe that the example the ballerina set, without my fully realizing it, incited in me to gradually change my behavior and shed the uncertainty and nothingness that filled me.

The novel opens with his memory of picking up her young son, Pierre, from school, and he describes frequently picking up or looking after the boy. In the present-day he admits that:

I'd very much like to know what became of him. I did some research over the following years, but I didn't know his family name, he who had no family.

       As to the dancer herself, while he surely knew her name, he does not reveal it: her significance is in her identity as a dancer, not the individual. The fact that he does not reveal her name is striking in this novel where he identifies so many others -- many incidental figures -- by name, including quite a list of: "a few dancers from Studio Wacker, whose names I still recall". He also mentions her being a student of the real-life Boris Kniaseff (also: Knyazev); in this and other ways he positions her -- but still leaves out something as fundamental as her name.
       The narrator drifts around in typically Modianoesque fashion, encountering a wide variety of people -- many, of course, of at least slightly dubious character (as one admits: "How can I explain ? We belonged to a somewhat particular milieu"). Among them is Maurice Girodias, the "curious publisher" of the famous and notorious Olympia Press ("He had been publishing in Paris a series of English-language novels that were banned in the Anglo-Saxon countries"). Girodias enlists him to fix up -- including fill up, with some extra chapters and bits -- a novella by a Francis La Mure, The Glass is Falling. The narrator doesn't claim to have done much with it -- "I'd say it was really more of a copy edit" -- but still, there's a sense of accomplishment here, and it is work that required some discipline; as he notes at a later point regarding the endeavor: "I'm following the ballerina's example". If little more than a pebble, it was clearly also something of a stepping-stone for him.
       As to his relationship with her, even as it was clear that she: "evidently felt affection for me, I always wondered whether she took me seriously". He sees himself as clearly not in the same league as her, but finds a kind of guidance -- even if only, apparently, fleetingly (as he eventually at some point lost track of her).
       Ballerina is yet another slim Modiano novel where:

Time, which has blurred faces, has also erased reference points. All that remains are a few puzzle pieces, forever disconnected.

But he does, of course, connect some, threads that lead via different people and memories to a small but full and fairly rich picture, a past becoming (yet another) part of what he now sees as the: "eternal present". Even with these loose, few brushstrokes Modiano effectively contrasts, for example, contemporary Paris with that from this time he describes -- and, as always, he portrays this time of trying to find one's way and a purpose in life very well.
It's all quite familiar Modiano territory (and exposition), better seen and taken as another piece of his larger project rather than slim stand-alone, but certainly a fine little work as such.

- M.A.Orthofer, 12 January 2025

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Links:

Ballerina:

Yale University Press publicity page
Folio publicity page
Carl Hanser Verlag publicity page

Reviews:

Patrick Modiano:

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

Other books by Patrick Modiano under review:

After the Circus
Afterimage
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

Other books of interest under review:

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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