After the Circus by Patrick Modiano -fiction in translation-Mark Polizzotti translator

Previously published in the New York Journal of Books, November 30, 2015

http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/after-circus

Review by Amy Henry

With age usually comes wisdom, and when waxing nostalgic, one usually sees the significance of youthful events in a new and understanding light. However, for our protagonist in Patrick Modiano’s new novel, After the Circus, it appears that even the passage of time has left him confused about the time when he was just reaching adulthood, alone in Paris.

author Patrick Modiano

Modiano’s writing is minimal in the extreme: He doesn’t share pages of descriptions of landscape or weather or clothing styles or significant architecture of the city of lights. Even night and day are hardly distinguished. The main character Jean is hardly described at all in terms of appearance or mannerisms. His new companion, Gisele, is noted tangibly only by the mention of her raincoat and skirt and sweater. Beyond that, nearly every supporting character is without distinguishing marks.

Perhaps the minimalism is to focus on the story’s plot, which also is quite minimal. A tight story arc gives the novel its focus, and it’s entirely intentional. Modiano’s lack of specificity creates a fog or haze over the city of Paris as its characters move and act below. And writing as he does from the viewpoint of an older man looking back, the lapses in memory (from choice or age) are entirely appropriate.

While lacking much description, he does give the novel a mood. A sense of foreboding that is at odds with the simplicity of many early scenes. The mood pervades, however, as day and night and meal after meal in nameless restaurants demonstrates the couple’s idle and unfocused path. Dark streets are traversed repeatedly, lending a sort of symbolism to their future.

translator Mark Polizzotti

Of note is Modiano’s little trick for springing unexpected revelations on the reader. For example, on their first night together, Jean roles over in the bed they were sleeping in.  At first the reader is led to believe they shared it platonically. But he notes that she is nude beneath her raincoat. And the story proceeds. As a reader, the reaction is, “Wait! What was that? Were they intimate and thus she was nude? Did she remove her clothes to sleep? Or, (more significantly) had she been nude underneath her raincoat all day long? During the police questioning?” It’s a small detail that impacts the story a great deal, and Modiano doesn’t feel obligated to explain.  As the novel progresses, you begin to wonder if Jean even knows that answer.

The plot itself is simple: a young man, newly freed from parental control is living temporarily on his own (with an oft-missing caretaker) after his parents move to Switzerland. He’s under age and bored. We first meet him being questioned by the police because his name was found in a suspicious address book. He has no answers for their ambiguous questions. After he leaves, a woman enters and is similarly questioned, but out of his earshot. When she leaves, he meets up with her at a café, and after she asks the dangerous question, “Will you do me a favor?” they somehow become inseparable, based on their shared police experience and nothing more.

She’s slightly older but appears years wiser and often takes notice of his naiveté with merely a look or a long pause. Silent mostly, they spend the next few days sharing his old apartment, walking the dog, and eating out quietly. Their conversations are minimal and one can’t help but wonder where their attraction lies. 

Soon, she introduces him to some friends, older businessmen, and Jean admires the attention they show him. He feels they are benevolent and ready to assist his exciting new future. Jean’s sense of self-absorption is noticeable, perhaps from his sheltered youth, convincing him everyone is looking out for his best interests. 

Again, the reader feels exasperation, wanting him to realize more has to be going on around him. Older Jean, looking back, expresses this: “If I could go back in time and return to that room, I would change the bulb. But in brighter light, the whole thing might well dissolve.”

Gisele shields him from any ugliness (often leaving him in the car with the dog), and now in love, they decide to move to Rome after one last favor for her friends. So kind her friends are! They’ve provided them with cash for the move and even that car! Again, just for a brief favor. Jean only begins to sense, as they pack for Rome, that something may be amiss. It’d be a good time for his parents to advise him, yet they’re gone. The question then jars the reader: Why exactly did his parents move in the first place? 

Time is a tricky player in this novel: Jean lives and makes decisions in present time, his older self is observing backward in memory, and then older Jean actually returns to the places and haunts that clouded his mind so many years ago. Clarity is never fully attained, lost in that same fog and mist that romanticized Paris and served to confuse young Jean years before.

Published by Yale University Press

A Margellos World Letters title

Spring Tides by Jacques Poulin (French translation)

Translated from the French by Sheila Fischman

Supporting the translator, to every means possible, seems to be the theme of this unsettling and comic book from Jacques Poulin. The story told is held up by the elements of myth and fable that make the island setting and bizarre visitors seem to impart a greater meaning than had they been placed anywhere else. Translator (Teddy) seems to be the focus, there’s also a Prince, an Author, the Boss, the Organizer, a Professor, a ghastly woman called Featherhead, and an Ordinary Man who come to share the small island with a princess named Marie and a family of cats. Of course, the Author is a grump.

Teddy arrives first, and his work as a comic book translator appears top-secret as his boss frequently flies in to check on him and his work, while also delivering, via helicopter, any possible item that Teddy might find helpful (which is how Marie arrived). Teddy works and swims, and focuses on the tides that isolate the island but also seem to keep it, while stationary, in fluid motion.

Interactions between characters are what propel the events, more so than the arc of a plot. Each character reveals something completely different to what we’ve understood about Teddy. So as they arrive, he appears to unravel a bit, both in our perception and in his literal mental health.

Reading this felt relaxing and amusing. The little digs at publishing, especially the character of the Author, felt spot-on. But something about this made me feel I was missing a bigger picture. Almost as if it might have been even more tragic-comic had I known what the joke was. Because that’s what I felt, as if I only had heard the punch line and was missing the setup of an “in” joke between the author and the story. What am I missing? I tried to find some literary link to another island with similar characters and all I could get was Gilligan (and don’t worry, this is not Gilligan’s Island).

Despite that, I did enjoy the word play, especially the behind the scenes nature of translation and why Teddy chose particular words over others, and his explanations for doing so.

While I review for Algonquin, this was acquired as purchase I made two years ago.

Beside the Sea, Veronique Olmi

Translated from the French by Adriana Hunter

It's difficult to decide what subgenre this literary fiction title would fall under.  In some ways, it's a crime novel, with the crime heavily foreshadowed from the beginning.  But, more likely, it would be a psychological thriller, one that has you holding your breath from the suspense and completely terrified by what you know is going to happen.  In either case, this book has an emotional pull that can't be resisted, even though you may wish to step away from it at times.

The story is of a troubled woman, a young mother with deep mental issues, who decides to take her two sons on their first trip from their city home to the sea.  Right from the beginning, this mother also indicates it would be their last trip as well.  They arrive to a dark and dismal seaside town, where the sea is far from lovely and the streets are filled with oblivious and often harsh strangers, with no idea of the horror that is unfolding.

In some ways the book appears to be working backwards from the inevitable crime that appears at the end, simply because each detail succeeds in predicting the event.  It's hard to explain how this forward-backward motion is accomplished, but it works to create intense suspense.  Maybe set a timer to remind yourself to breathe occasionally.

While this mother is clearly insane, there are moments when she appears almost sympathetic.  She details the efforts of social workers to instruct her on how to better 'mother' her children, and she resists their advice.  Since it's written in the first person, we get a glimpse at just how irrational she is.  She attributes ill motives to her children, strangers, and even the weather and the sea.  She seems to have no practical skills or common sense:  she finances their trip with a can of coins that turns out to be just a few dollars, although she imagined it to be a windfall. 

"I definitely was disorientated in this place, everything was always behind me and I didn't know it, everything was there, and I just kept turning, turning round and round while everything waited for me."


Her problem, likely some form of bipolar disorder, is presented by her almost constant need for sleep, and her vision is sometimes affected when anything remotely complex appears in her life (such as climbing the stairs to the hotel room).  It's heartbreaking to read of her young sons, hungry and silent, waiting for her to waken, while they sit in their cold and dark hotel room.  The oldest son, Stan, is an especially intuitive child, and there is a sense that he may know what is unfolding.

This would probably be considered a novella, but it's impact is not minimized by its size.  As a character study of the mother, it is flawless in describing an inner struggle with sanity in a world that appears insane on its own. 

Special thanks to Mieke Ziervogel of Peirene Press, London for the Review Copy.

The Waitress was New, Dominique Fabre

"I'm only a barman, and when I forget that, the world around me seems like a bunch of different movies running at the same time.  There are romance movies and sad movies, and if you pay attention most of their stories start to get all mixed together, till there's no way you can go on telling them to yourself.  It's like they're all chasing after each other..."


This excerpt shows the complications inherent in the life of the "simple" bartender.  Rather than being the nameless face behind the bar, important only in his quick delivery of a cocktail or beer, this novella by Dominique Fabre goes much deeper into the life of a very complex man.  The story takes place over only a few days, yet we see, in detail, the conflicts within him and within his profession in the upscale cafe Le Cercle, where he's worked some eight years.

There's an abundance of unique characters, from the black-dressed young man who covers his poetry books with paper to hide the contents, to the articulate, kindly man who argues with the Moon and on to the beautiful but betrayed owner's wife.  One of the underlying themes appears to be the pathological desire for order that Pierre, our fifty-six year old barman seeks.  From his keeping the restaurant functioning to the way he does his laundry, Pierre is the picture of routine efficiency mixed with constant self-analysis.  Yet his memories, that flood him often, reveal a past far from the orderly and efficient one he is living now.

This version is translated from the French by Jordan Stump and published by Archipelago Books.