A book of unsolved mysteries

Atrick Modiano, the French language novelist and winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature,is an enigmatic character whose novels are moody, laconic and sometimes dreamlike. Avoiding the limelight, he has written more than 30 pieces of work including novels, children's books and screenplays. With his characteristic modesty, he ended his Nobel Prize acceptance speech delivered in Stockholm on December 7, 2014 with the words, "Yet it has to be the vocation of the novelist, when faced with this large blank page of oblivion, to make a few faded words visible again, like lost icebergs adrift on the surface of the ocean." Many of Modiano's novels fall under the genre of "mystery" and he lets the reader piece together the puzzle he lays out in very few words.

Honeymoon, a slender masterpiece translated from French by Barbara Wright, begins in a hotel in Milan, Italy, in the middle of August. The narrator Jean B. is an "explorer" and a documentary filmmaker who travels to exotic places across the globe. There are two mysteries in the novel, one about Jean and the other links to a woman named Ingrid whom he knew many years before. Mystery one involves Jean who while making plans to go to Brazil to shoot his next film but decides to go into hiding from his friends and his wife, Annette. He flies to Milan to hide for a few days and there he learns that a woman had committed suicide a few days before in the same hotel where he was staying. The name of the woman, Ingrid, rings a bell, since as a young traveller he had met a couple, Rigaud and Ingrid, who lived modestly on the Riviera. The narrative then goes back and forth between Jean's life in Paris where he moves from one cheap hotel to another in an attempt to live an anonymous life and solve the mystery of Ingrid's suicide.  In this pursuit, which is almost akin to that of a detective trying to solve a murder, Jean appears to have found his calling. As he was flying back to Paris, he is nostalgic and says,

"…During the return journey I let myself drift into a state of euphoria such as I hadn't experienced since my first trip to the Pacific Islands when I was twenty-five. "

The plot then moves to Paris during the German occupation of France from 1939 to 1944, a recurrent theme in Modiano's novels.  He is recognized in the Nobel Prize announcement for this characteristic of his work. Modiano was honored, "for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation". While he was born in 1945, a few months after Paris was liberated by Allied Forces, Modiano had a fascination for the happenings in Paris during the Occupation. He alludes to his preoccupation with Paris under Occupation In his Nobel Acceptance Speech,

"That Paris of the occupation was a strange place. On the surface, life went on 'as before' – the theatres, cinemas, music halls and restaurants were open for business. There were songs playing on the radio. Theatre and cinema attendances were in fact much higher than before the war, as if these places were shelters where people gathered and huddled next to each other for reassurance. But there are bizarre details indicating that Paris was not at all the same as before. The lack of cars made it a silent city – a silence that revealed the rustling of trees, the clip-clopping of horses' hooves, the noise of the crowd's footsteps and the hum of voices. In the silence of the streets and of the black-out imposed at around five o'clock in winter, during which the slightest light from windows was forbidden, this city seemed to be absent from itself – the city 'without eyes' as the Nazi occupiers used to say. Adults and children could disappear without trace from one moment to the next, and even among friends, nothing was ever really spelled out and conversations were never frank because of the feeling of menace in the air."

In the story of Ingrid we get a taste of what life was like under French Occupation. Ingrid and her father, an Austrian-born Jewish doctor, are under constant fear of being caught by the Germans since they did not have proper papers. She befriends Rigaud and then they spend some time in Southern France. The title of the book came from the ploy used by Rigaud and Ingrid when they were in the French Riviera during World War II. They would regularly tell anyone who asked that they were on their honeymoon, to divert attention from Ingrid who was only a teenager although she looked older.

There are many mysteries that remain unsolved in this novel. Two of them are the cause behind Ingrid's decision to take her own life and the forces that push Jean into a situation where he does not want to have any connection with his wife Annette, his friends, and other acquaintances. We learn early on that he suspects that his wife is sleeping with his longtime friend Cavanaugh, and that he is having a mid-life crisis. But, is there something else that causes him to walk away from everything he worked for, a career that he enjoyed, and the life in Paris that he loved? The puzzle is not easy to solve since even after he goes missing, he is living in Paris, and visiting some of the same places where he grew up and spent his former life in. It is not clear that he did all of this just to stay away from his cheating wife and to start a new career as an amateur investigator. When his friend Ben Smidane, who finally found him in Paris and was attempting to bring Jean and Annette back together under the same roof, tells Jean that he was leaving the next day for the Indian Ocean for several months, he replies,

"You're lucky to be still at an age to go away… This had escaped me. Just like that. I too would have liked to go away instead of going around in circles on the periphery of this town like someone who can no longer find any emergency exits."

And then, we never learn why Ingrid took her own life. The early life of constantly being on the move during German occupation and the trauma that it caused might have been a factor. But then we find her living a comfortable life, in French Riviera with Rigaud and driving fancy cars. Rigaud might have been a few years older than him, but he was very respectful of her situation. Ingrid would constantly disappear for a few days to see her father an Austrian-born Jew who was also living a fearful live. And then there is the question of whether her father was taken away by the Germans and then released or killed. All we know is that she finds out from the hotel 'patron' (the manager ) that "... very early one morning, about the middle of December, some policemen had gone up to look for her father in his room, and taken him away, he didn't know where."

But Modiano offers the readers a few clues here and there to assist them solve the mysteries.  For example, an acquaintance Smidane undertakes a search for him at the request of his wife and after meeting him attempts to persuade him to go back to his wife. When Jean says "No", Smidane is frustrated and declares,

"Jean, I find your attitude disconcerting." He finally says, "It's very simple. I just feel tired of my life and my job," and continues, "One starts out full of enthusiasm and the spirit of adventure, but after a few years it becomes a job and a routine…"

As to why Ingrid took her own life, he reaches a conclusion that is akin to why she decided to move away from his everyday life.  The last few lines of the books are very philosophical, and reflects Modiano's existential creed.

"Circumstances and settings are of no importance. One day this sense of emptiness and remorse submerges you. Then, like a tide, it ebbs and disappears. Then, like a tide, it ebbs and disappears. But in the end it returns in force, and she couldn't shake it off. Nor could I."

The reviewer lives in Boston, and is a regular contributor to this section.