A Paris Plan

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A Paris Plan
“From day to day, with the passage of time, I find, perspectives become blurred.” So Patrick Modiano begins the second chapter of “Dora Bruder,” his enigmatic search through modern-day Paris for traces of a woman he’d never met, who had disappeared before he was born, during the Nazi occupation of France. The translation from the French contains one of those imprecise English approximations. The bidirectional “day to day,” a phrase that seems stationary, marching in place, has much more trajectory in the original D’hier á aujord’hui, “yesterday to today,” a phrase that layers time on top of time. The distinction is telling. When my novel “Paris Twilight” was published this summer, one earlier reviewer felt constrained to note, “In addition to the characters mentioned above the city of Paris is also a character.” I was pleased that he noticed. The reason Paris is a ‘character’ in the book, and not just a locale, has everything to do with the difference between “day to day” and “d’hier á aujord’hui.” Different cities have different relationships with time. Some municipalities perform (happily) the role of blank canvases, an ongoing present tense on which the lives of residents can play themselves out. This is true even for some old cities, old, at least, by American standards. The New England port city where I live is venerable enough that the window panes in its earliest buildings have turned lavender from centuries of sunlight, and its Colonial cemeteries and meeting houses are an international tourist draw. Yet its history seems to burden its daily life not at all, and sits safely in the travel brochures and quaintly in the tour-guide reenactments with muskets and tri-corner hats. Other cities are the opposite, their pasts press against you as soon as you step out the door. Their histories, even when those histories extend all the way back to the Celts, seem as urgent and current and tangible as if the place itself were struggling with a mortal fate alongside the struggles of its citizens. “I moved to New York,” a friend who’d grown up in St. Louis once told me, “because I knew it was a city I could never get to the bottom of.” I understood her meaning. The city she sought was no blank canvas, but an insistent, demanding companion. In the daily drama of such a place, the place is also a character. In “Dora Bruder,” Modiano excavates his city. Writing from the vantage of 1996, he remembers the Paris of his youth in 1965, when he haunted the same neighborhoods his subject haunted in 1942: all three eras combine into one impression. As a mere visitor to the Paris that Modiano inhabited, I’ve enjoyed, over and over, the same sensation. On the corner of a house by a park, a modest plaque. It memorializes an assassination during World War II, a tragedy that, if time were accordioned accordingly, might have been witnessed by a German composer in the 19th century completing a celebrated opera, or (if he leaned out the window a little) by a soon-to-be famous American writer, completing his first novel in the 1920s, or by the masons building the house in the 1600s, or by the Romans laying the road. For so much to have occurred in one spot! I am only out for a walk, but the past of Paris refuses to leave me alone. Every little thing that goes on there is watched by all that went on there before. You step off a curb or round a corner and, of a sudden, the ages open ahead of you, deep enough to make you dizzy. During a stay in Paris over the fall and winter of 1990 and ’91, I learned to nurture this particular vertigo. I made a method of it. Along with my brand new Michelin “Paris Plan” (“plan” is another of those nicely untranslatable words, implying in English, as “map” does not, both cartography and chronology), I carried an old Guide Bleu I’d picked up at a second-hand book store. It had been published in 1928, and as I following its descriptions around town, I was treated to an extra layer of history at every turn, the book’s present being for me another past, my present its unimaginable future, and the stationer’s shop (it informs me) that once was a stables belonging to a favorite mistress of the king being now a storefront for a chocolatier. Knowing (as the book could not) about those chocolates somehow extended its histories forward for me, from yesterday into tomorrow. The descriptions were so innocent—innocent of the pall of the Depression and the carnage of the war about to descend—that reading them made my own awareness less complacent, more attentive to the momentariness of everything around me. I say “enjoyment,” but to be honest, that was a difficult winter for me. I was by myself, with, at least on arrival, no acquaintances. It rained. My apartments, first in the 20th arrondissement and later in the 5th, were cloisters of isolation. I bought a CD player to defray the silence and spent my days in cafes and libraries composing long letters to a friend back home in the blank-canvas city of San Francisco, and wandering the streets with my Paris Plan. Years later, my friend lent me the letters to look over, and reading them was an odd thing, visiting this stranger in this other time, a person more firmly rooted in the place and the moment than in his future self. Reading the letters was like reading an old Guide Bleu or a plaque on a wall, a milestone in my own half-scrutable history, its present my past, when my future was unimaginable. Decades into that future, those letters would become wellsprings for a novel. None of their words show up in “Paris Twilight.” I never looked at them as I worked on the book. Nevertheless, the…
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