It has been often enough said that persons who move from their native soil to new pastures, the self-imposed or the imposed exiles, are the true citizens of the modern world. Not to claim they are at ease in their identity. Especially when 65 million people are refugees. But the exile experienced what everyone experiences now: dislocation, deracination, less and more painful nostalgia, along with the complexities of continuing linkage with their birthplaces, with family and friends.
Today, on the streets of the world’s cities shamble the homeless, with their rags, their wagons and their mental and physical wounds. To what, to whom do they belong? Yet their plight, without underestimating it, is ours, we who have homes and cars. In our buildings’ elevators, we observe the young engaging with their cellphones, not with us, as the floors sweep by. We play with homelessness when we take holidays. experience our sugary dislocation and are usually grateful to be home again, already planing the next escape.
But underlying our play, the forces that have erupted to the sound of gunshots recently in Britain and in the USA as the toy of demagogues in training — globalization of trade, the typhoon of technology — these have left us all adrift. We never could go home again, of course, but there was solace in dreaming we could.
Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano’s Pedigree: A Memoir, (the 2015 Yale University Press translation by the very accomplished Mark Polizzotti) is a guidebook of exile. Embedded in the same fogged and shifting landscape as his novels of searching puzzlement, Modiano’s memoir reaches from his birth at the end of WW II to publication of his first novel in his middle twenties, for it is then, one suspects, and only then, he acquired a functioning identity.
The memoir is a catalogue of names, exotic names, names that themselves are in continual transition, as the young Modiano scrambles to survive the identity virus with which the German occupation and Vichy France infected French people during WW II, and the anti-parenting strategies of his mother and father, whose goal was to provide as little love and stability to the boy as they could without getting arrested, although they were unsuccessful at both. His mother suitably was a bit actress, pretty well always on the skids. The father, a progenitor like John le Carre’s, a conman inventing impossible schemes at “home,” and in other countries that were themselves confidence schemes, signed his infrequent and always unsupportive correspondence with the boy with his, the father’s, full three names, as if to emphasize that his identity was entirely dependent on his saying and writing those mellifluous syllables enough times and with enough of a flourish.
Modiano’s catalogue of names is in fact the story of his youth. He frequently admits he no longer possesses the facts underlying his memories, if he ever did. Only the names, the often fraudulent names. The act of naming becomes a prayer. Say enough names and a world will be born.
Pedigree charmed this fan of the author. Its short sentences and elliptical nuances delighted the way French film can. Its Parisian streets and edifices resonated with evocation. Paradoxically it provided comfort to this reader who feels appropriately uneasy in the fiction, for it demonstrated that the novels’ searching was exactly the author’s, and if his, then mine, and all of us in uneasy company. Let us continue our work of finding out how to come home together.
J. B. Thompson 