This is high literature in the FRENCH tradition and not necessarily to American tastes. That is to say that the work exhibits a biting irony and the fine perfume of decadence in one of the most amoral of times--the era of the Vichy government and of the German Occupation of Paris during World War II. With the hindsight of a Nobel Laureate prize, it is possible for many more of us to admit the daring and the scope of this trilogy. It helps immeasurably that the work is now translated into a fine and idiomatic English prose from the probably even finer French.
We have here three short novels that could only persuasively have been written by a French Jew with a lasting European perspective. The overall work deals with the unlovely topic of 'collaboration' with the World War II Vichy Government and with the more Germanic occupation of the Northern part of France, including its jewel, Paris. In this novel, Paris and the 'evasive' nature of Parisian culture is lovingly evoked. The landscape and streetscape are called out in detail. Memories are treasured...even if they are ambiguous, decadent or even treacherous. The overarching story is that one is placed on earth and one lives with what one is given...and the whole confection is not necessarily 'sweet.'
Each of these short novels is fine but they gather resonance by standing together. As I read the first novelette, 'La Place de L'Ettoile', is an unsparing look at collaboration based on 'identity' politics. Even the French Jews who collaborated are 'called out' by name. Equally daring, the then young writer, Modiano, called out Zionists who created kibbutz's which he depicts as closely equal to Aryan racial supremacist communities. This is strong stuff but this author is calling the game as he sees it!
As I read Modiano, European Jews belong in Europe. By extension, American Jews belong in the country their forbears contributed to...OURS! Modiano shows Jewry suffering wherever...but seems to urge the strong to 'fight the good fight' and to stay to enrich the land in which their ancestors made a place.
The first novel, 'La Place d' Etoile', is suitably 'French' in its languor and its dizzying panoply of images and in its disorientation and in its sultry depictions of decadence. Our Jewish hero is caught unprepared for the demands the fall of France will place upon him. He capitulates based solely on his will to survive (in the manner of what he calls Jewish 'rats' who have weathered centuries of pogroms and who have developed prodigious coping skills) and on his unfortunate erudition which has led him to a position of moral relativism.
The second novelette, 'The Night Watch', continues in the heavy vein of French irony and black humor that one also finds in films of the 1960's through 1980's. Our 'night watch' man is a double agent youth of Jewish extraction. He also lacks a moral compass, aside from his determination to save his mother and to provide for her no matter what odious things he has to do as a collaborator. In this story, we meet a delicious and decadent and totally loathsome group of profiteers and careerists such as can be found on every side of a world at war.
The third novelette follows a young Jewish man who tries desperately to save his father, a war profiteer and grifter from 'day one' of his life in Alexandria. They are now in Paris. Ten years previously, the father has tried to kill his son...possibly to spare him from the 'difficult times' in which they were living. The loving evocation of Paris and its neighborhoods continues. Father and son are so equally ambiguous in their morals and in their taste for louche company that one thinks a bit of an apple not falling far from the tree--but the son is far more modern that is his Levantine father. Can we save our parents or their world? With a world such as these two generations found themselves living in, would one want to? The powerful trilogy continues 'fresh' and with 'punch' to the end.
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So things go: and this should already be enough to motivate serious readers to buy this book and to read it for its admirable combination of loathing for the times and the people it, in part, produced and for its honest and lasting legacy of what Collaboration truly can involve and how corrosive Collaboration can be to even less than honest souls.
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