Review by Booklist Review
Modiano (Scenes of the Crime, 2023) received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2014 and has continued writing novels increasingly sketchy in form that still manage to evoke an unmistakable atmosphere, like an Old Master drawing that captures a scene in a few faint lines. Ballerina is as much about the nameless narrator's attempt to reconstruct a period as it is about the unnamed dancer. The narrator knew the ballerina back then, stayed sometimes in her room, and looked after her young son. While there are a few frightening episodes, the narrator might be a ghost haunting the world out of boredom. Even if he could walk through walls and go back in time, he wouldn't know more about what happened than the little he can recall. Late in the book there is a startling reference to 2022, to "the worst times I'd ever known." COVID-19 was another period when so much went on behind closed doors and so many felt despair and turned to memories for sustenance, only to discover how insubstantial and fleeting they can be.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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.)
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