Read Online Suspended Sentences by Patrick Modiano - Free Book Online

be published. I had finally emerged from that period of vagueness and uncertainty during which I lived as a fraud. I would have liked it if Jansen had been around to share my relief. I was sitting at a café near Rue Froidevaux, and for an instant I was tempted to go call at the studio, as if Jansen were still there.
    How would he have greeted that first book? I hadn’t respected the instructions of silence he’d given me the day we’d spoken about literature. No doubt he would have deemed it much too indiscreet.
    When he was the same age as I, he was already the author of several hundred photos, some of which composed Sun and Snow .
    That evening, I flipped through Sun and Snow . Jansen had told me he wasn’t responsible for the namby-pamby title, which the Swiss publisher had chosen himself, without asking his opinion.
    As I turned the pages, I felt more and more what Jansen had been trying to communicate, and what he’d gently challenged me to suggest with the word silence . The first two images in the book bore the same caption: At number 140 . They depicted one of those clusters ofbuildings on the outskirts of Paris on a summer’s day. Nobody in the courtyard or in the doorways to the stairs. Not one silhouette in the windows. Jansen had told me that a friend his age had lived there, someone he’d known in the Drancy transit camp. When the Italian consulate had Jansen released, the friend had asked him to go to that address to let his relatives and girlfriend know how he was doing. Jansen had gone to number 140, but he’d found none of the people his friend had mentioned. He’d gone back again after the Liberation, in the spring of 1945. In vain.
    And so, feeling helpless, he’d taken those photos so that the place where his friend and his friend’s loved ones had lived would at least be preserved on film. But the courtyard, the square, and the deserted buildings under the sun made their absence even more irremediable.
    The next images in the book dated from before the ones of number 140, since they’d been taken when Jansen was a refugee in the Haute-Savoie: expanses of snow, its whiteness contrasting with the blue of the sky. On the slopes were black dots that must have been skiers, a toy-sized ski lift, and the sun beating down on all of it, the same sun as for “number 140,” an indifferent sun. Through that snow and that sun showed an emptiness, an absence.
    Sometimes, Jansen took objects from very close up: plants, a spider’s web, snail shells, flowers, blades of grass with ants bustling among them. One felt that he trained his gaze on something very specific to avoid thinking about anything else. I remembered when we’d sat on the bench, in the gardens of the Champs-Elysées, and he’d photographed his shoes.
    And once again, mountain slopes of an eternal whiteness beneath the sun, the narrow streets and deserted squares of the South of France, several photos all with the same caption: Paris in July —my birth month, when the city seemed abandoned. But Jansen, in order to fight against the impression of emptiness and neglect, had tried to capture an entirely rural aspect of Paris: curtains of trees, canal,cobblestones in the shade of plane trees, the clock tower of Saint-Germain de Charonne, the steps on Rue des Cascades … He was seeking a lost innocence and settings made for enjoyment and ease, but where one could never be happy again.

He thought a photographer was nothing, that he should blend into the surroundings and become invisible, the better to work and capture—as he said—natural light. One shouldn’t even hear the click of the Rolleiflex. He would have liked to conceal his camera. The death of his friend Robert Capa could in fact be explained, as he saw it, by this desire, the giddiness of blending into the surroundings once and for all.
    Yesterday was Easter Monday. I was walking along the portion of Boulevard Saint-Michel that stretches from the old Luxembourg station to