La Danseuse

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

On its publication, the author told a journalist from Le Monde: “I have the impression that I am always writing the same book, discontinuously […]. Certain names recur from one novel to another, and I would be unable to say in which specific novels each of them appears.” Within this vast, ongoing work, Dora Bruder (1997) and Un pedigree undoubtedly hold a special place, and La Danseuse recalls them at times. Realistic details continually emerge from the haze: names, addresses, extracts from police reports. And dance. Modiano had already evoked it in Un pedigree, and returns to it here with force: George Balanchine’s ballet La Somnambule (1946) caused him “great emotion” when he saw it 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 that dancer [Maria Tallchief] moved for a long moment in silence, like a sleepwalker […]. By chance, 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.” The novel also features the famous “Auteuil 15.28,” the number that recurs in so many of his novels. Modiano finally admits: “It is an imaginary number that has never rung and to which no one has ever answered in real life.”