La Danseuse

La Danseuse is Modiano’s most recent novel, and one of his shortest works of fiction.

On publication, the author told a journalist from Le Monde: “I have the feeling that I am always writing the same book, in a discontinuous way […]. Some names recur from one novel to the next, and I would be unable to say in which specific novels each of them appears.” Within this vast body of work, Dora Bruder (1997) and Un pedigree undoubtedly hold a special place, and La Danseuse recalls them at moments. Realistic details always emerge from the haze: names, addresses, extracts from police reports. And dance. Modiano had already evoked it in Un pedigree, and returns to it forcefully in this novel: George Balanchine’s ballet La Somnambule (1946) caused him “great emotion” when he saw it performed as a child. “It was the first time I had seen a ballet,” he recalls. “I would be unable to say why I felt such a shock when this dancer [Maria Tallchief] moved for a long moment in silence, like a sleepwalker […]. As chance would have it, I came into contact with the world of dance at a very young age, and I felt the greatest admiration for the work of dancers. Nothing to do with my mother, who was never a dancer. At most a mere ‘extra’ in two revues in Brussels when she was eighteen.” One also finds the famous “Auteuil 15.28,” the number that recurs in so many of his novels. Modiano finally admits: “It is an imaginary number that never rang and to which no one ever answered in real life.”