Scene of the Crime

Nobel laureate Modiano (Invisible Ink) delivers a dense narrative of a writer exploring his past. After Jean Bosmans hears a familiar song in a Paris café, he begins jotting down memories from 50 years earlier, when he was roughly 20 and dating a woman named Camille Lucas, who earned the nickname Deathmask “because she often remained silent and inscrutable.” These qualities take hold on Bosmans’s imagination, which Modiano dramatizes in a series of noirish flashbacks that make up most of the narrative. Through Deathmask, Bosmans is led to a house he once lived in as a young boy, and to an apartment he visited at around the same age. These visits trigger slowly developing memories of something he witnessed in that house and the suspicion that Deathmask and the people he meets through her are laying a trap for him. Polizzotti’s crisp and evocative translation keeps the reader hooked, as in a passage tracking Bosmans fading relationship with the City of Light, which “now showed people and things as they were, in their true colors.” Unlike in Modiano’s previous work, it takes a while to get a purchase on what’s going on, but once it comes together, there are some gentle thrills and mild intrigue involving what might have been some kind of a heist. This isn’t Modiano’s best, but his fans won’t mind. (Jan.)