In a marvelous phrase, Erich Heller credited Franz Kafka with having achieved “the most obscure lucidity in the history of literature.” Heller’s witty oxymoron could be applied with equal justice to the French writer Patrick Modiano, the author of roughly two dozen novels and novellas and winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature.
When Modiano, born in 1945, received the Nobel, a handful of his books were available in English, but many were not. Thanks to the prize, previously untranslated books appeared in English, and new work was promptly translated by Mark Polizzotti, so there was a consistency in voice.
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Ballerina, released in Polizzotti’s English translation in January, is even briefer than most of Modiano’s fiction, but it doesn’t feel skimpy or rushed. The title figure, whose name isn’t given, is a young ballet dancer in Paris with a small son, Pierre, whom the narrator sometimes escorts here or there and spends time with when she is practicing her art. In an unforced way, the narrator is influenced by her commitment to dance, which “enables her to survive.” Except for a short passage near the end, we are never directly privy to her consciousness. Rather, we see her from the narrator’s perspective, in fleeting glimpses of memory decades after the fact.
Readers who don’t care for Modiano might say he keeps writing the same book over and over. The narrator, often first-person, sometimes third-person, revisits a series of episodes in the distant past. A passage from 2021’s Scene of the Crime, published in English translation in 2023, is typical: “In a Montmartre street in those years, he had crossed paths one afternoon with Serge Latour, the man who sang ‘Gentle Lady.’ That encounter — barely a few seconds — had been such a minuscule detail in Bosman’s life that he was amazed it resurfaced in his memory.” What follows is musing about that tiny “encounter,” evanescent, yet haunting enough to make the protagonist “even more sensitive to the dust — or rather the odor — of time.” And from this moment of “obscure lucidity,” the entire short novel flows, at once vivid and fragmentary.
In Ballerina, our narrator is himself an artist in the making, though at first, he doesn’t know it. Almost as if by accident, he finds himself saying “in a firm voice” in response to a question from the ballerina’s dance partner about what he does with his life, “I write books.”