"Invisible Ink" by Patrick Modiano

Invisible Ink

by Patrick Modiano

(Translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti)

A review 

It’s as if all this was already written in invisible ink. How does the dictionary define it? “Ink, colourless when first used, that darkens when treated with a given substance.” Perhaps, at the turn of a page, what was set down in invisible ink will gradually emerge, and the questions I’ve been asking myself for so long about Nöelle Lefebvre’s disappearance, as well as the reason I’ve been asking myself those questions, will be resolved with the precision and clarity of a police report. In a neat hand which looks like mine, explanations will be provided in minutest detail, the mysteries cleared up. And perhaps this will allow me, once and for all, to better understand myself.

In October, Yale University Press, in collaboration with the Margellos World Republic of Letters, will be publishing Patrick Modiano’s latest work, Encre sympathique, in a lovely English translation by Mark Polizzotti.  In this novella, the Nobel-Prizewinner explores the themes of identity, memory and the past.  These are time-honoured subjects in literature, to which Modiano himself has repeatedly returned, turning them into a sort of leitmotif of his oeuvre.

The narrator of Invisible Ink, to give the novella its English title, is one Jean Eyben who, thirty years before he sets out to recount his story, worked for a stint with a detective agency in Paris.  One of the cases in which he was then involved was the disappearance of a young woman, Noëlle Lefebvre.  The facts which his boss, Hutte, provided him with were scant, and Eyben’s attempts at discovering the whereabouts of the elusive Noëlle soon drew a blank – so much so that he started to doubt whether the subject of his investigation did exist at all. 

This notwithstanding, the case intrigued Eyben enough for him to take the file with him when he quit the job.  Eyben has got on with his life, but every so often, he returns to the Lefebvre file and has a go at solving the mystery.  With the passage of time, the days of his youth becoming increasingly distant, Eyben’s efforts to fill the blanks in the investigation lead him to question his own memories and impressions.

     

Indeed, there is much that is tentative in the narration – Eyben himself admits that his account does not follow any formal order.  At one point he states that he must force himself to respect chronology as much as possible so as not to “get lost in those spaces where memory blurs into forgetting”.   Soon after, however, he gives up – “it’s impossible to draw up that sort of calendar after such a long time… memories occur as the pen flies. You shouldn’t force them, but just write”.  He then reveals that he has “never respected chronological order… Present and the past blend together in a kind of transparency, and every instant I lived in my youth appears to me in an eternal present, set apart from everything.”

The title of the novel (as well as certain plot elements such as the thin, uninformative file and the few vague entries in Nöelle’s day book)  become a metaphor for memories which, besides often being few and incomplete, tend to eventually disappear.  Like invisible ink, they may return if given the right nudge.

Towards the end, the narrative shifts to the third person, and the setting moves from Paris to Rome. In this part of the book, Modiano shows that being a “literary author” (for want of a better description) need not be at the expense of good, old-fashioned storytelling. The ending – poetic and moving, almost bordering on the sentimental – provides a satisfying solution to the mystery at the heart of the novella.  At the same time, aptly for a work on the transience of memory, Invisible Ink leaves us with plenty of loose ends – certainly enough to leave the narrative clouded in a metaphorical fog.  The few certainties we acquire are hard-earned but thrilling, like a ray of light breaking through the haze among the mountains of Eyben’s youth.      

   

Hardcover, 176 pages

Expected publication: October 27th 2020 by Yale University Press