Lost, in Identity

this is the book cover, from Amazon.com…

A book review here, translated…

This, is a tale about a son, searching for his own father. With the twists and turns in the plot.

The son never knew the father as a child, but, his father showed up in front of him, all of a sudden, when he’d turned seventeen; without a passport, and worked in trades in the black markets, is a pimp. And so, this young man spent a period of unsettling days, that felt more like a dream in Paris with his own father. They’d not had a set place to live in, kept changing their residential address constantly. They were frequents at the private meeting places in Egypt, the bars where the businessmen who traded horses hung out, and met up with the clients at lobbies of grand hotels too, for the sole purpose of, making that huge sales. One day, this father-and-son pair walked along the circular abandoned train tracks in Paris, walking, and, as they’d walked into the subway stations, the father who was suspicious, pushed the son onto the tracks, attempted to kill him. Afterwards, the father vanished, disappeared, off of the surface of the earth, was never heard of again.

not my picture

Ten years later, the son had looked endlessly, for his father, and finally had, found him. He’d learned, that his father had been in close contact with a whole bunch of opportunists, and so, he’d tried to blend into the bunches, and at which time, his own father didn’t recognize him. The writer, through the memories of his own father, and observations that he’d made of his own father, called up a period of lost times, even an era of amnesia too—it was, during the second World War when the Germans took over Paris. The story ended at a crazy wedding party, he’d left with his father, ran off, and in the end, they were both caught, and, thrown into the transportation trucks of runaway fugitives.

Loss, escape, tracking down, and making discoveries, are the central themes of Modiano’s novels. After he’d won the Nobel Award for Literature in 2014, he’d said in the interviews, “I’m writing in the same novel for fifty years straight.”, and, if you’d read other works by Modiano, the Les Boulevard de Ceinture, a story of searching for a father, you wouldn’t find the storyline to be unreasonable, that you’d had to, guess what he was trying to get at.

Modiano was born in France, his father, of Italian and Jewish descent, during World War II, his father escaped persecution because of a falsified identification, and during the era of war, a lot of people felt, that if they don’t become someone else, then, they will get killed. And, in Modiano’s book, he’d not specifically told about the war, instead, he’d, questioned the purpose of having an identity. In the loss of the identity, the son also became just like the father, changing his identity constantly, tracking down his own father. As for the reason for tracking his father down, it’s NOT solely on how people are searching for stability in times of turbulence. The process of tracking down can be seeing as the author’s primitive desires for the roots of life, and it’d also showed how the limits of fears inside a person is tested, the depth of the scars. The search is endless, and you can never get the whole picture. And so, the process of seeking out one’s own identity became a purpose on its own, bearing witness to the life that’s without any support. When the father and son were arrested, the son said, “Toward a confused, lost boy like me, the police station symbolized something that’s certain, something of stability.” Sounding pessimistic, but, it’d broken the central theme of not having anybody to depend on, and being incarcerated, these two, contrasting beliefs, and so, there were, no boundaries to the emotions, and, it’d gone beyond everything imagined and factual.

So, this, is still how the writer used his own experiences, or what he bore witness to, to help him create and come up with the story for the masses, and, because the writer is writing about something that everybody can relate to, which would probably be why, his books are so popular!