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the complete review - fiction

Little Jewel

by
Patrick Modiano

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

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Our Assessment:

B+ : evocatively sad and lonely

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "Each encounter, each neon sign and garage becomes a node of significance in the author’s cartography of loss. By this we are made to feel the awful emotional vulnerability of a small girl’s abandonment, almost as if we are reading Madame Bovary from the perspective of her child." - Gregory Day, The Australian
  
  
• "Wer den Autor noch nicht kennt, sollte ihn mit diesem kleinen Juwel kennenlernen." - Wolfgang Schneider, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
  
  
• "Dieses Buch hat Peter Handke übersetzt. Woran man das merkt? Daran, dass man es nicht merkt. Handkes Übersetzung bleibt wunderbar unauffällig, ist im besten Sinne dienstbarer Geist. So bleibt das Buch, was es nicht zuletzt auch ist: eine ganz und gar undeutsche Literatur, leicht, schwebend, mit sich selbst beschäftigt und sehr kunstvoll. Das pralle Leben besorgt man sich am besten am Wochenende. Die Kunst hingegen findet man in Büchern wie diesem." - Jochen Jung, 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:

       'Little Jewel' -- 'la Petite Bijou' -- is what Thérèse was called, for a while, as a small child. It is part of her lost youth, something her mother called her -- a mother who disappeared from her life, and reportedly died, in Morocco. So Thérèse was told -- though the vagueness of it all leaves her with doubts: she had told herself she would once travel to Morocco: "It was the only way to verify you were dead".
       Thérèse is a female protagonist, but otherwise bears many similarities to Modiano's typical characters, the story-focus on the time in their lives when they are coming of age and independence while still burdened by the mysteries of absent mothers and fathers. In Little Jewel Thérèse recounts the period when she was nineteen, already more than a decade after her mother disappeared from her life, the novel beginning with her seeing a woman in a yellow coat who, she believes, might in fact be her mother. She follows her -- stalks her, even, to some extent. The woman remains oblivious -- "I was certain that, even if I walked level with her, she wouldn't notice me" -- another revealing feature, because Thérèse's mother seems to have been similarly oblivious in her complete self-absorption. ("I had replaced the dog", Thérèse recalls, about a brief time when her mother paid her some attention .....)
       Thérèse's mother was always a shadowy, vague figure: "your first name, Sonia, was made up", for example, and Thérèse is certain that she lied about her age: "falsifying her papers in order to appear younger". The figure the nineteen-year-old Thérèse obsesses over remains as shadowy and vague; Thérèse observes her, listens to her, but is ultimately unable to make a connection.
       One of the jobs Thérèse took on around that time is that of minding a young girl for a few hours a day. The girl is like a younger version of herself, already left largely to her own devices by self-absorbed parents who seem to have no idea what to do with the young child. And:

They never uttered her first name. After all these years, I couldn't tell you now what that name was. I've forgotten it, and I wonder if I ever even knew it.

- M.A.Orthofer, 7 August 2016

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Links:

• Text publicity page
• Yale University Press publicity page
• Folio publicity page
• dtv publicity page
• Einaudi publicity page

• ANZ LitLovers LitBlog
• The Australian
• Berliner Zeitung (German)
• Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (German)
• literaturkritik.de (German)
• kokoba
• Lecture/Ecriture (French)
• masuko13 (German)
• Messengers Booker (and more)
• movieschocolatebooks
• patpalbooks
• Dr.Tony Shaw
• Sydney Morning Herald
• Tony's Reading List
• Die Zeit (German)

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

• After the Circus
• Afterimage
• Flowers of Ruin
• Honeymoon
• In the Café of Lost Youth
• La Place de l'Étoile
• 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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© 2016-2021 the complete review

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