2023-10-04 16:01:48
The dancer
by Patrick Modiano
Gallimard, 112 p., 16 €
novel of his “beginnings in life”story of the foggy years of a very young man on the cusp of his art, The dancer will undoubtedly occupy a special place in the work of Patrick Modiano. The novelist tells himself as he is today, lost in a tourist Paris that he no longer recognizes and suddenly assailed by reminiscences of the young author that he was, in search of his own discipline and his writing. The faces and names, the snippets of discussion reveal the inextinguishable difficulty of writing, and build page by page a beautiful bittersweet coming-of-age novel: “It was inevitable that one day or another the ice would melt and that these images would reappear like drowned people who rise to the surface of the Seine. »
Is he this narrator who works on other people’s novels in a poorly heated room in the Madeleine district? Is he Pierre, a shy little boy, of whom the narrator keeps the tender memory of a child “asleep, forehead resting against the arm of the chair” ? Or is he his mother, a classical dancer met during a dinner show at La Boîte à Magie near Boulevard Pereire?
So what obstacles does this little warrior from an underworld environment have to face, from which she wants to free herself through hard work, raising a child whose father has disappeared. She plays her existence in the “smells of old wood, lavender and sweat” from the Wacker studio in Place de Clichy, where she learned her discipline through pain as she saved her skin.
The precious time of dreams and introspection
No doubt Modiano is a bit of all of these at the same time, walking with his characters in silent companionship: “We must take measured steps to avoid the disorder and traps of memory. » And the author rehashes, he repeats and reinterprets “those things that have already been written and keep coming back, like refrains” he confides today to The cross – we find Saint-Leu-la-Forêt there, we meet the mystic Madeleine Perraut again…
He reigns over The dancer the singular darkness that Modiano likes, this ” between dog and wolf “ which, in the solitude of the moment, allows precious time for dreams and introspection. The delicious march of his memory unfolds easily, adjusted to the steps of his dancer. “At first, I had trouble keeping up with her, but I eventually got used to her pace. And little by little this feeling of emptiness and stagnation in the depths that overcame me at certain times of the day disappeared. It was like she was helping me to the surface. » In this novel full of delicate melancholy, dance and writing finally come together, sisters of patience and suppressed pain, of excellence finally: “So much work to give the illusion that we are flying effortlessly a few meters from the ground”…
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