Missing Person

Patrick Modiano is not a popular household name, anywhere not even in the Anglophone academic and literary
world. I will admit that I was not quite familiar with his work either when I heard last October that he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature for 2014.  Modiano is the 16th French writer to be awarded this prize, giving France the distinction of being the country with the largest number of Nobel Laureates in Literature  since the awards began in 1900. One factor contributing to his relative obscurity is, only eight of his twenty eight novels have been translated into English. However, as I later discovered, Modiano is very popular in Europe, particularly among "New Wave" intellectual circles. So I started researching his work, and found a list of his "must read" books, and at the top was "Missing Person" which also happens to be his most known.

A common theme in Modiano's work is the loss of memory, the loss of self, and discovery of our identities.  In awarding the award to Modiano, the Nobel committee cited his work for "the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life world of the Occupation". His father was Jewish and lived in Paris during the German Occupation, and we see the effect of these circumstances in this novel: Paris during Occupation, collaboration with the Germans, abandonment, solitude, and lack of roots. 

The novel starts with the writer proclaiming, very boldly, "I am nothing." Thus begins his quest to find his identity and his former self which until now, for ten years, has remained hidden to him. What we know is that he is a private investigator and goes by the name Guy Roland. What triggers his new-found enthusiasm to research his past, and his journey to gather, and piece together, pieces of information that might take him back to his childhood and youth is the retirement of his mentor-cum-boss at the private investigation agency. His boss, Hutte, meets him for the last time before he returns to Nice to lead a life of retirement after passing on the baton to him. So the once-oblivious detective goes about on a mission to find the person he formerly was and morphed into the present day Guy Roland. Using fragmentary evidence and the skills acquired as a detective: photographs, scraps of paper, old newspapers, and directories in the agency. Nonetheless, these offer very few solid leads. But he keeps on searching and on his mind are questions that we might all relate to: "Could he really be that person in a photograph, a young man remembered by some as a South American attaché? Or was he someone else, perhaps the disappeared scion of a prominent local family? He interviews strangers and is tantalized by half-clues until, at last, he grasps a thread that leads him through the maze of his own repressed experience."

Modiano, a French national who was born in 1945 published this book, his sixth novel, in 1978 as Rue des Boutiques Obscures when he was only 32 years old,  and captures the mood of the post-War Paris, where the ghost of Occupation and Vichy collaborators still haunted the survivors. We learn that Guy Roland lost his identity during the War, due to amnesia, and attempts to find out who he really was by working methodically using techniques he learned by working for the detective agency. His mentor, recently retired boss, C.M. Hutte, gave him a new name, a job and his current self. But he is bothered by the lack of any information about his childhood, youth, and his family. From archival photographs and interviews with individuals he comes across through his investigations he attempts to reconstruct the events before his loss of memory. 

The book, translated from the French by Daniel Weissbort, has some interesting features. Modiano is not a man of many words, but he is able to convey to the reader the sense of loss and the risk that Guy bears as he searches and goes from one clue to the next. Some of his "chapters" are short and cryptic. For example, Chapter 19 has the following only: "Mr. Jean-Michel. 1, Rue Gabrielle, XVIII. CLI 7201." End of chapter. For the confused reader allow me to parse this chapter. It has the name of a possible contact for the investigation, Mr. Jean-Michel who lives on Rue Gabrielle on the 18th Arrondissement in Paris. Finally the phone number. 

Only one curious aspect of this novel. It ends with Guy following some broken leads and then finally undertaking a trip to Polynesia.  The Polynesian Islands appear to have a fascinating lure for French artists and writers since the time Paul Gaugin went there in the 19th century and left us with some memorable pieces of paintings. Guy is looking for a man named Freddie, and when he lands on the island of Tahiti he finds that Freddie has gone to a nearby island but his boat, a schooner, had washed up on the shores of Papeete. At this juncture, Guy resolves to find him since he believes that Freddie is still alive and just hiding out on an atoll. 

Modiano leaves us with an Existentialist dilemma and question at the end. Guy had carried a photograph of a girl named Gay Orlov with the intention of showing it to Freddie on reaching Tahiti. When he discovered that Freddie was missing, he looks at the photo of Gay once again and notices she was crying. The tears in a little girl's eye in a photograph taken many years ago brings in him a feeling of emptiness and maybe a yearning for his lost days. And Modiano asks, "Do not our lives dissolve into the evening as quickly as this grief of childhood?"

The book will resonate with people, both young and old, who find themselves lost, either because they were adopted at childhood and are trying to find their birth parents, had some memory loss or some other traumatic experience, or just having a mid-life crisis and trying to find where their roots are. In today's environment, the above is not such an unrealistic scenario since the popularity of genealogy tools and DNA tests have allowed migrants and children who never knew their parents to track down lost family and ancestors. 

So, finally, what is remarkable about "Missing Person"? It is very short but complete, and the vocabulary is sparse. It employs a narrative style that might be called "phantasmagorical", meaning a random series of events or figures in a fantasy or dream like state.  Imagine a scenario where you went to India during the War of Liberation in 1971. During the journey,which was very arduous and caused you tremendous hardship, you had a traumatic experience and lost your memory. You returned to Bangladesh after Liberation, and following a chance encounter with a generous person, you receiveda new identity and found work in the post-Liberation Dhaka. But after a few years, you wanted to find out who you were before the War and started from a scratch. Writing a book about searching one's roots can be easily done in a voluminous novel. But try doing so within 50,000 words. And you probably get to appreciate why this novel has generated such interest after Modiano received the Nobel.

The reviewer is frequent contributor to this page.