Suite Nocturne - Patrick Modiano (French)
What helped make Such Fine Boys successful, I see now, is that it was made up of self-contained stories about different people. This novella (it’s barely over hundred pages) has one first person narrator, and though individual scenes are comprehensible, the plot holding it all together isn’t. It seems to be a metaphysical mystery in which a man in his sixties is on a search – one that takes place entirely in his memories – for a foundation to his existence, and he was “relying on the sea-green Fiat and its driver to help me discover it.” In the opening scene he’s twenty and is hit by the Fiat when crossing a Paris street. He’s brought to a hospital, but his injuries aren’t serious. Much of rest of the book involves the young man’s efforts to find the woman who was driving the car. It seems that he knows her, in some vague way. The word “seems” has already appeared twice in this review; not a good sign. I don’t like to be immersed in a nebulous world, especially when no clear answers ever emerge. The novel ends with the narrator finding the woman, and they’re immediately (and mysteriously) on familiar terms. She invites him to the apartment where she’s staying. The last paragraph has them together in an elevator; Modiano writes: “Her hand was resting on my shoulder and she whispered something in my ear.” What she whispers is never divulged (why not?). The predominant thought I was left with was “What’s been going on?” As is the case in Boys, one thing going on is parental neglect, and this time it reaches extreme proportions (no mother, a silent specter of a father, a feeling of having “come from nothing”). Are we on shifting sands for all our lives without a loving family to ground us? If Modiano is making that dubious point, he does so in such a roundabout way that it loses force. I closed my review of Boys with the stated intention of reading more by this author. Now – unless I’m assured that the work is more accessible – I think I’m done.

An Unmarried Man - Darryl Ponicsan
I liked the movies “The Last Detail” and “Cinderella Liberty” – they had their hearts in the right place and rang true. Darryl Ponicsan was the author of the novels both films were based on, so I got this book. For a while there were things that kept me engaged: the vindictive wife and the lawyers were good, as were the financial details of a marital break-up. But this is the husband’s story, and though I was meant to feel empathy for Ben’s loneliness and despair, I couldn’t. His responses to situations were unrealistically over-the-top, making him seem like a dope, and I was bothered by his crudity. Still, the workmanlike writing carried me along for what I hoped would be a mild diversion. Then, quite suddenly, near the midway point, a plot contrivance caused it to fall apart. A woman moves into an apartment adjoining Ben’s; she’s the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, one who, he thinks, kings would desire. She’s intelligent, has a sense of humor, is compassionate and morally upstanding. She’s also, for reasons inexplicable to me, ready to go to bed with Ben after one brief meeting. What follows are sex scenes depicted in ugh-inducing detail. When Mr. Ponicsan launched into a description of cunnilingus I had quite enough of him. And so yet another book bites the dust. And all I want is to be entertained.

Identity - Milan Kundera (French)
In looking over my four previous reviews of books by Kundera, I came across the same conclusion reiterated in slightly different words: “Kundera is a cerebral writer, more a moral philosopher than a novelist. Plot is subservient to his intellectual pursuits, and though we’re constantly in the minds of his characters, they function mainly to convey his ideas.” Of those five novels I thought only one fully succeeded – Life Is Elsewhere, which came out in 1969, when the author was forty years old. At the end of Identity the reader is informed that it was “Completed in France, in Autumn 1996” (when authors gain Kundera’s eminence they often record such momentous events for posterity). This novel gets a ditto to my quote above. The two people whose thoughts are being dissected are Chantal and Jean-Marc. Chantal is receiving anonymous letters, and I found her reactions to them interesting. But this plot premise is interrupted by much expounding (mostly by cynical men) on a variety of philosophical topics. So a question arises: Kundera may be intelligent, but is he a novelist? The ending of Identity provides an answer. Somehow Chantal winds up naked at an orgy. How she got there isn’t clear (the last look we had of her she was fully clothed in a phone booth at a London train station). At any rate, she’s terrified, running about a strange house, trying to escape. There are many exclamation marks (!) to emphasize her state of mind. Then the next chapter begins with Jean-Marc clasping her shuddering body: “Chantal! Chantal! Chantal! Wake up! It’s not real!” Yes, folks, Chantal was dreaming. At this point, one page before the end, the author arrives on the scene: “And I ask myself, who was dreaming? Who dreamed this story?” Kundera goes on at length in this mode, closing with: “At what exact moment did the real turn into the unreal, reality into reverie? Where was the border? Where is the border?” Well, Milan, I’m not smart enough to answer those deep questions. But I am smart enough to recognize a really dumb ending when I read it. And I can also do simple math: you were seventy-eight when you completed this book (in France). Maybe it’s time to give up writing fiction and direct your intellectual energies elsewhere.

Half a Life - V. S. Naipaul
This novel is made up of three sections taking place in three worlds: India, London, Africa. In the India section we get the life story of Willie Chandran’s father. Since Willie assumes his father’s first person voice to tell this story, it serves to establish Willie as a writer. For the rest of the book Willie tells his own story. He’s an aimless young man, and a decision is made to send him to London where he’s to study to become a teacher. He has no interest in becoming a teacher, and we get almost nothing about his studies. The subject of the London section is his social education: he gets caught up with various groups, various people. He begins his sex life, which is tentative and unsatisfying. He writes a book made up of sketches set in India; though it gets published he’s not proud of his accomplishment, nor is the book successful, and the matter of his writing is dropped. In London Willie marries Ana, and they go to Africa to live on an estate she inherited. He will stay there for sixteen years. We get an in-depth look at a world exotic to me (and to Willie). One aspect that comes across strongly is the prevalence of interracial sex. Ana is mixed race – Portuguese and African – and such a mix, in some form, is the norm. All sections are good, but the Africa one is the best – up to a point. As Willie nears age forty, a shift in emphasis takes place. Though he loves Ana he’s not fulfilled by her, and he starts to frequent clubs where he has sex with African girls. Or, rather, children (the African belief, Naipaul informs us, is that a female is ready for sex when she has her first period). Later Willie enters into an affair with a woman whose husband is the manager of a nearby estate. The attraction is immediate and mutual (they look into one another’s eyes and get a message). Willie was never a very appealing character, but when he became so absorbed in the quality of his orgasms I had my fill of him. At this point the novel ends abruptly, with Willie leaving Ana and Africa (as a violent uprising looms). On the last page he tells her that he had been living her life too long. Since the life that awaits him goes untold, I saw the title in a new light. In Half a Life we get half a book. Possibly the sixty-nine year-old Nobel Prize winning author found an old manuscript in a drawer and did some work on it, but hadn’t the will to follow Willie’s journey any further. Pure supposition.

Village in the Sun - Dane Chandos
Ajijic is a village in Mexico. Chandos resided there for a year (in the 1940s), and he writes about how the villagers lived and how he fitted himself into that life. But with a book like this you must be on friendly terms with the narrator, and my attitude toward Chandos became increasingly critical. I objected to how he turned a young man into a flunky who learned how to properly set a table and mix drinks; I was bothered by his attitude toward the “humorous” ways of the villagers. As for fitting in, he doesn’t; he adjusts circumstances so that he can live in a privileged manner (also, he’s often away, at the houses of friends in cities). He purports to have liberal views and compassion for the impoverished, but he’s quite stingy (he believes that to earn the villager’s respect you mustn’t throw money around). He tells little about his private life – I didn’t even know his nationality – but the most insight comes when he has a globetrotting visitor (Provence, Cannes) who exhibits all the stereotypes of the unenlightened bigot. It’s a catty portrayal, and Charles comes across as a parody of effeminacy (“Isn’t that divine!”). I felt that the two men were cut from the same clothe, and I didn’t care to spend any more time with Chandos. I would find it interesting to know what private thoughts the villagers had about him.

Such Fine Boys - Patrick Modiano (French)
The “fine boys” of the title all attended the prestigious (or, at least, expensive) Valvert School on the outskirts of Paris. But the novel isn’t concerned with life at a fictional boarding school (and Valvert isn’t depicted as a place of cruelty and victimization). Modiano’s subject is the years after school. In chapters that read like short stories we get glimpses into how some of the former boys are getting on in life. As men they aren’t getting on; an aimlessness seems to prevail. They look back at their years at Valvert with nostalgia; some still hold onto their personality as it was when they were fifteen, others lead dangerously derailed lives. Near the end of the novel a character says to himself “our school had left us completely unprepared for life.” But the fault lies in another direction. What emerges forcefully is how the boys were neglected by their parents. Since they had no caring family, their compatriots at the school became their family, and when school was over they were cast into a void. Modiano is quite good at creating a mood that’s melancholy and at times eerie. His prose is crystal clear, but the way he structures the book isn’t. He switches narrators from first to second person, and the stories that constitute the chapters don’t take on a novelistic narrative. The resulting elusiveness seemed purposeful, and I never felt confused or frustrated by any game playing. Some of the stories are slack, not as compelling as others. But to use the word “compelling” at all is high praise. In the Foreword Le Clezio (who, like Modiano, is a Nobel Prize winner) writes that the Little Jewel passages “are among the loveliest pages written in the French language in the second half of the twentieth century.” I agree, they are lovely. I’ll read more by this author.