Clouded memories: Ballerina, by Patrick Modiano, reviewed

There are, broadly speaking, two types of artist: the explorer and the miner. The explorer keeps moving on, staking out new aesthetic or thematic terrain, while the miner keeps returning, digging deeper into the same earth each time. Patrick Modiano, the French Nobel prizewinner for literature in 2014, is an artist firmly of the second camp.

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Ballerina may be Modiano’s 32nd novel, but it feels more like the latest haunting chapter of the one long book that makes up his career. Blending noir, elegy, Paris and an obsession with memory, Modiano writes like Proust conducting a police line-up. And so we step again into a world of half-remembered faces, veiled characters, ambiguous relationships, subtle threats, amateur detectives, mistaken identities, sphinx-like women, disappearances, sudden returns and the persistent whiff of crime.

Gracefully translated by Mark Polizzotti, Ballerina is narrated by an ageing Modiano-surrogate after a chance encounter triggers a memory of the ‘most uncertain period of my life’, when he was finding his way in Paris some 50 years earlier. For reasons that are never entirely clear, he spent this time hanging out at a dance studio among its social satellites, meeting dancers and witnessing ‘the discipline which allows you to survive’. He also got embroiled in the love affairs of ‘the ballerina’ – a woman whose cold edge belies a mix of mysticism and pain, which dance unlocks. Later, another chance encounter in a café gets him his break ‘in literature’, ghostwriting chapters of a novel. Soon after, the ballerina and her coterie vanish.

We never learn the narrator’s name nor the ballerina’s.