Jérôme Garcin reads Modiano's new book as memoir in disguise

Writing in his regular column for Bibliobs (Le Nouvel Obs), Jérôme Garcin turns his attention to "l'Eléphant", a new novel by Patrick Modiano that he calls both short and, in his word, superb.

According to Garcin, the book finds Modiano gathering himself and resembling himself more than ever, the critic's formulation for a writer whose fiction has long circled the same terrain of memory, absence and postwar Paris. Garcin frames the novel as a kind of memoir written in plain sight, suggesting that in "l'Eléphant" the line between Modiano's invented narrators and his own recollected past grows especially thin.

The column gives no summary of the plot, no publisher name and no page count, and Tomeling's readers keeping an eye on the rentrée shelves will want to watch for those details as they surface. What is clear from Garcin's piece is the tone of the reception: admiring, and pitched toward longtime readers who have followed Modiano's decades-long return to the same handful of obsessions, now condensed, in his account, into a brief and assured book.

Modiano, the 2014 Nobel laureate in literature, remains one of the few living French novelists whose new titles are treated as events in themselves, and Garcin's column, however short on plot detail, confirms that "l'Eléphant" is being read in that light.