Villa Triste

A young man known as Victor Chmara (“the name I used on the registration form”) flees Paris to a lake town in France, close to Switzerland. It’s hard to tell what he fears, but wants to be able to escape to the traditionally neutral country if necessary. “I didn’t know yet that Switzerland doesn’t exist,” he says. He meets a slightly older woman named Yvonne, with a melancholy Great Dane, and her friend – a doctor named Meinthe. They also appear to be running – from their pedestrian roots. With no one being exactly who they say it’s no surprise that there’s no clean resolution or break when the time comes. This story has a wartime feel, with imminent danger lingering about the edges, but takes place in the early 1960s.

A holiday town in Haute-Savoie, near Geneva. Victor Chmara recalls the time he spent there as a young man near the start of the war in Algiers. His memory is both precise and muddled. He can recall the clothes that people were wearing in great detail, street names, the lights across the lake, but he has forgotten faces and most names and perhaps even why he had come to that town or why he lingered. Back then he took up with a local girl named Yvonne and her friend Meinthe, who may or may not have been a doctor. Together they skimmed the edges of high society and low farce. But mostly the past, for Chmara, is like a dream, indistinct, full of portent, yet mostly likely meaningless. Except perhaps for the vivid realization that the future show more was slipping out of reach for he and his friends.

This early novel by Patrick Modiano perfectly captures his signature style. There is the untrustworthiness of memory, the juxtaposition of youth and lost-youth, the vagueness of desire, and the underlying threat of violence. To describe it as atmospheric would be an understatement. And why does Victor travel with a suitcase full of telephone directories? The unexplained here is ever unexplained. Classic Modiano.

Very easy to recommend. show less

Villa Triste is a very French-film-voice-over sort of novel: full of ambiguities and unresolved hints, mournful in a vague sort of way, infatuated with the American chic of the Great Gatsby era, heavily laden with adjectives and visual description. We never learn the narrator's real name or what he is running away from, or even the name of the resort-town where he is hiding out (as far as the last two go, "conscription" and "Annecy" are strongly hinted at, but never confirmed). We know from the start that there's not going to be a happy ending, and indeed the narrator makes it clear that he doesn't know, and apparently hasn't made much effort to find out, how all the threads of the story came out.

What the book really seems to be about show more is the problem of how we are constrained in life by our origins. The narrator is someone whose background is clearly as romantically complicated as Modiano's own, and who would like nothing more than to come from somewhere and have a nice, safe, bourgeois family to escape from; Yvonne is the classic small-town girl who wants to be a big star but doesn't quite have the drive to get away from her provincial comfort-zone (think Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly); René is the effete gay man who has to deal with his father's reputation as a great war hero (even in 1975, Modiano could probably have got away with making him slightly less of a homophobic caricature).

Interesting, charming, beautifully written, but somehow it all feels incredibly old-fashioned. More 1920s than 1970s, really. show less

odiano has a melancholic bent whose sentences vibrate (“like a spider’s web”) with a kind of menace. We are never really sure who deserves the most scrutiny amongst his characters, but everyone in this novel seems to be hiding some dark past or grim present. Even the dog, a Great Dane, was “congenitally afflicted with sadness and the ennui of life.” In Modiano's lavish description of the locale, a fashionable small French resort across a lake from Switzerland, even the trees are a mystery:
"The vegetation here is thoroughly mixed, it’s hard to tell if you’re in the Alps, on the shores of the Mediterranean, or somewhere in the tropics. Umbrella pines. Mimosas. Fir trees. Palms. If you take the boulevard up the hillside, you show more discover the panorama: the entire lake, the Aravis mountains, and across the water, the elusive country known as Switzerland."
Why “elusive”? We never learn why. “I didn’t yet know that Switzerland doesn’t exist.” Perhaps it is the notion of safety that doesn’t exist. A nineteen-year-old is not expected to know that, not then, not now. Modiano liberally salts his work with phrases that fill us with an unnameable dread. Count Victor is no more Count than you or I, but somehow we’d rather believe that than whatever it is he is running from. He is the son of Russian Jews, and the Second World War is over at least fifteen years. He is wealthy beyond imagining, but he has fear: he’s “scared to death” he tells us early on as he recounts the time he met Yvonne and Meinthe.
”When I think of her today, that’s the image that comes back to me most often. Her smile and her red hair. The black-and-white dog beside her. The beige Dodge. And Meinthe, barely visible behind the windshield. And the switched-on headlights. And the rays of the sun.”
Modiano writes like a painter paints. He weaves sound and scent along with color and emotion, light and dark.
”We returned through a part of the garden I wasn’t familiar with. The gravel paths were rectilinear, the lawns symmetrical and laid out in picturesque English style. Around each of them were flamboyant beds of begonias or geraniums. And here as well, there was the soft, reassuring whisper of the sprinklers. I thought about the Tuileries of my childhood. Meinthe proposed that we have a drink…
In the end, the three of them, The Count, Yvonne, and Meinthe make quite a hit in that town at that time. Photographs show them glamorous and solemn, walking arm-in-arm beside the dog, Meinthe taking up the rear. Meinthe and Yvonne win the coveted Houligant Cup for that year and are sought-after companions for their edgy stylishness. Gradually Meinthe and Yvonne share pieces of their shadowy background with Victor, and the glamour, he realizes, is all rhinestones and rust.
“The rooms in 'palaces' fool you at first, but pretty soon their dreary walls and furniture begin to exude the same sadness as the accommodations in shady hotels. Insipid luxury; sickly sweet smell in the corridors, which I can’t identify but must be the very odor of anxiety, of instability, of exile, of phoniness.”
When “France suddenly seemed to [Victor] too narrow a territory,” he proposed they ditch the local act and take to the road, somewhere where they could show their true capabilities…America.

Later, when it is all over, we think that perhaps Victor’s fear stems from his youth, his aloneness, his uncertainty. He grew up that summer by the lake, and saw most of what there was to see. Later, when he ambles under the arcades on the Rue de Castiglione reading a newspaper, his education comes full circle, and the mystery begins again.

Promotional copy for Villa Triste, due out today in a new translation by John Cullen and published by Other Press, calls it Modiano’s most accessible novel. It may well be, but all Modiano’s great themes are present. This fine translation does justice to the underlying greatness of the work. A fine piece of literature that can keep you mulling events over in your head for a long time to come. show less

Unlike much of Modiano's works, this is not set in Paris. It's set in 1960 at an unnamed French lakeside resort near the Swiss border (Lac d'Annecy, perhaps). The protagonist, Victor, is a stateless young man (Russian?) who meets up with a mysterious woman and her even more mysterious friend. Everything is Modiano vague; forgotten names, faces, places. Although Victor is not in Paris, he is constantly comparing streets, bars, houses to those he remembers from Paris. Along with Modiano vague, we have Modiano specific: street names, details of furniture, clothing, cars.

Souvenirs de jeunesse dans une station balnéaire - le narrateur se remémore un été avec deux étranges amis, sur un fond inquiétant de la guerre d'Algérie. L'atmosphère de ce roman rappelle The Great Gatsby - sous tous ces rires, ces fêtes, ces cocktails, on ressent un profond malaise, une incertitude et un cynisme dont on ne se départ jamais. La fin même se termine sur une note d'ambiguité qui pose plus de questions qu'elle n'en répond. Ce n'est pas une tâche facile que de réussir cet insaisissable, et l'auteur s'en tire à merveille. Une lecture curieuse et envoûtante.

Gli anni ’60 di Modiano e Françoise Hardy
Grande pittore di atmosfere, come è nel suo stile, Modiano questa volta dissolve la trama, ridotta a nulla, e semplicemente, ma magistralmente ricrea il vissuto giovanile o, per lo meno, un vissuto giovanile dei primissimi anni ’60. Due ragazzi, una starlette di provincia in cerca di affermazione nel cinema e un giovane apolide in fuga da se stesso e dalla realtà (la guerra d’Algeria), trascorrono, in una località dell’Alta Savoia, un’estate d’amore, che si intuisce infuocato, ma che è solo tratteggiato in punta di penna. La carica erotica è potente, ma sottintesa. E la storia d’amore è destinata a finire nel nulla, come la maggior parte degli amori estivi, che restano nella show more memoria con tratti sfumati e della cui stessa esistenza si finisce, col passare del tempo, per dubitare. Così come svaniscono i contorni dei personaggi accessori, ben presenti in quei giorni vacanzieri, il cui ricordo rimbalza in seguito solo se sono stati poi protagonisti di eventi tragici. Il clima è quello della Dolce Vita, una Dolce Vita di provincia e in versione francese, intessuta di spensieratezza e di inquietudine, più inquietudine che spensieratezza, destinate a sfociare nei rivolgimenti degli anni successivi. Ma anche questo resta non detto. Chi ha vissuto quegli anni ritrova lo scorrere dei giorni estivi e i divertimenti – si fa per dire – di quelle lunghe, interminabili, estati (certo solo per chi se le poteva permettere), ma anche il senso di insicurezza, di precarietà, di ricerca di altro che era proprio di molti giovani di allora e che i protagonisti del libro nascondono e affogano nella mistificazione o nell’auto-illusione, senza senso della misura come quando, con involontario umorismo, il protagonista pensa di sé e della sua compagna che potranno prima o poi emulare la coppia Marylin Monroe e Arthur Miller. Per ragioni anagrafiche Modiano ha ben conosciuto il tempo che descrive e quelle atmosfere, come conferma la storia della sua lunga amicizia con Françoise Hardy, idolo indimenticato delle adolescenti di allora, per la quale ha anche scritto dei testi (http://moked.it/paginebraiche/files/2009/08/PE-05-2015-LR.pdf ). Ai lettori più giovani questo dice certamente poco o nulla, ma chi c’era fa un salto indietro nel tempo e ritrova, inframezzati alla narrazione, nomi, storie e canzoni sepolte nella memoria (chi ricorda Belinda Lee, la figlia di Lana Turner e il gangster Johnny Stompanato, il cha-cha-cha, abat-jour… e poi i ‘dancing’ i ‘whisky a gogo’… e le Simca?) Ancora una volta, bravo Modiano, qui in un libro di esordio, nel quale sono però già in nuce tutti i temi della sua poetica del ricordo. show less