Chevreuse

Jean Bosmans, Modiano’s protagonist (who first appeared in L’Horizon in 2010), accumulates in his journal details that “at first glance have no connection with one another,” just like the characters cited, old acquaintances encountered even further back, across the pages of Remise de peine (1991) or Un pedigree (2005): Modiano here works as an architect, linking his earlier texts to one another as rarely before.

As usual, this is no change of scenery: Chevreuse is a new endless spiral, forever turning, settling, stopping, and returning to its point of attachment — childhood, which Modiano, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, described as the matrix of his entire body of work. He once again unsettles the hands of his many clocks and blurs memories only to readjust them. A way not only of writing a new novel, but also of rewriting the previous ones in light of these new clues.