Ballerina

Nobel winner Modiano (In the Café of Lost Youth) dazzles with this pithy and introspective mystery sparked by faded memories. It opens with the narrator remembering a favor he once did for a woman nicknamed “the ballerina” in 1960s Paris. After fetching the woman’s son, Pierre, from a child’s birthday party, the narrator took him home to her apartment. There, instead of the ballerina, he encountered a strange man named Hovine, whose features, now indistinct in the narrator’s memory, he reflects on ominously (“If someone were to show me two mug shots of his face... could I possibly recognize him”?). The narrator then encounters another figure from his past, a man he believes owned the nightclub where he first met the ballerina, but the man claims the narrator is mistaken. The narrator’s questioning of the man dramatically evokes a detective’s interrogation, and as he dredges up the past, he searches for clues to make sense of his recollections and their significance. Modiano delivers wondrous images of the tricks memory plays, sharply translated by Polizzotti (“And so a moment of the past gets encrusted in memory, like a flicker of light reaching you from a star that was thought long dead”). Readers will savor this wistful narrative. (Jan.)