Books in Review belated relationship between the two main characters. Modiano’s vast oeuvre (nearly thirty novels) remains centered on Paris and on its endless potential as a site of fleeting memories and vanished characters. Encre sympathique is one of his best recent novels. Edward Ousselin Western Washington University Elisabeth Åsbrink Made in Sweden: 25 Ideas That Created a Country Minneapolis. Scribe. 2019. 149 pages. MADE IN SWEDEN is, Elisabeth Åsbrink tells us, an expression of conditional love: “I love this strange country in which I happen to be born. But my love isn’t blind. Here are twenty-five reasons why.” This, taken together with the slim format and whimsical cover image—a circle of objects that includes a clog, a fish, and an assortment of leaves—suggests a very The narrator of Encre sympathique, Jean Eyben, recalls an episode from thirty years earlier, when he briefly worked for a detective agency and vainly attempted to find a missing young woman named Noëlle Lefebvre. For reasons left unexplained, the narrator has kept the case file for all these years, even though its disparate contents provide a very incomplete picture of who Noëlle Lefebvre was and why the detective agency had once sought to find her. Jean Eyben’s sporadic reminiscences of his fruitless investigation have been renewed by chance encounters, which lead him to recapitulate and revive his search for a character whose very existence he nevertheless comes to doubt, since it is delineated only by contradictory clues. In what is decidedly not a conventional example of detective fiction, Modiano alludes to some of his previous novels. For instance, Jean Eyben’s boss at the agency is named Hutte, a character who was present in Rue des Boutiques Obscures (1978). Modiano also leads his readers to various apartment buildings and neighborhoods of Paris, some of which have been completely renovated, so that they no longer seem to bear any trace of the places where Noëlle Lefebvre may have lived or worked. Sometimes linked to what could be called his investigation, the narrator’s ambulations through Parisian streets and through his intermittent memories are not presented in any perceptible chronological sequence. As a result of Modiano’s fictional exploration of the passage of time, a map of Paris (or at least parts thereof) comes to resemble a palimpsest. The last section of the novel is marked by a sudden shift from the narrator’s firstperson narration to third-person narration. This section is also set in Rome, where, so says a woman who appears to once have been Noëlle Lefebvre, “nothing ever changes”—as opposed to the ever-changing French capital city. The novel’s conclusion leaves open the possibility of a resolution of the initial plotline, not to mention a MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ Michel Houellebecq Serotonin Trans. Shawn Whiteside. New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2019. 288 pages. LITERARY CRITICISM NOWADAYS tends to walk the line between aesthetic and political judgment, but when it comes to the novels of Michel Houellebecq, the discussion has always fallen firmly around the latter. Houellebecq’s sustained rejection of Western liberal “progressivism” makes him something of an anomaly in the literary scene, while his prophetic engagements with current events—his novel Submission, for example, which imagines the Islamization of France, was published on the day of the Charlie Hebdo attacks—have done far more to throw him into the blazing headlights of the media than his forays into the soul and psyche of modern man. His latest novel, Serotonin, fulfils the usual criteria. Houellebecq presents us with a philosophical spin on the atomization of European society and of the vice grip of a bureaucracy whose “whole point” is “to reduce the possibilities of your life to the greatest possible degree when it doesn’t simply succeed in destroying them.” The forfeiture of individual liberties informs the subplot of the novel, which chronicles the decline of French agriculture under the pressures of free trade and seemed to anticipate the resistance of the gilets jaunes movement. But, as is often the case with Houellebecq, these sociopolitical grievances serve chiefly as a counterpoint to the personal decline of Serotonin’s ailing narrator, Florent...
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Nov 1, 2020
