Trying to bring my research up to date, I get a very strange feeling. It’s as if all this was already written in invisible ink. How does the dictionary define it? “Ink, colorless when first used, that darkens when treated with a given substance.” Perhaps, at the turn of a page, what was set down in invisible ink will gradually emerge, and the questions I’ve been asking myself for so long about Noëlle Lefebvre’s disappearance, as well as the reason I’ve been asking myself those questions, will be resolved with the precision and clarity of a police report. In a neat hand that looks like mine, explanations will be provided in minutest detail, the mysteries cleared up. And perhaps this will allow me, once and for all, to better understand myself.
I was attracted to Invisible Ink because author Patrick Modiano was the winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature, and because I hadn’t read him before. Now finished this fine novel, I see that other reviewers recognise various settings and characters in these pages; it would seem that Modiano has revisited the themes of memory and writing and missing persons across his oeuvre and his regular readers can see how Invisible Ink figures into that bigger picture. Alas, I would love to join their laudatory ranks and exclaim, “This is genius and essential!”, but that would be posturing on my part: This novel is fine — interesting and impeccably written (kudos to translator Mark Polizzotti as well) — but taken as its own discrete entity, I found it a short diversion and not much more. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
If I continue to write this book, it’s only in the possibly vain hope of finding an answer. I wonder — must I really find an answer? I’m afraid that once you have all the answers, your life closes in on you like a trap, with the clank of keys in a prison cell. Wouldn’t it be better to leave empty lots around you, into which you can escape?
Invisible Ink opens with author Jean Eyben looking back on a time, thirty years earlier, when he briefly worked for a detective agency (as life experience for his writing) and the one missing persons case he worked on, never solved. He recounts his efforts to locate this Noëlle Lefebvre — starting with the strange characters he encountered around Paris and their efforts to stymie the investigation — and at first I found the tale to be a bit Hitchcockian; suspenseful and potentially menacing. But as the narrative progresses, Eyben discloses that he has been intermittently working on the case file for all of these years (without encountering menace), and as he relates more encounters he has had with people who may have known Noëlle, never concerned with keeping the story chronological, it becomes clear that the author is looking for Noëlle — and making whatever writing he can out of the experience — in an effort to better understand himself and his own memories.
There are blanks in a life, but also sometimes what they call a refrain. For periods of varying length, you don’t hear this refrain, as if you’ve forgotten it. And then one day, it comes back to you unbidden, when you’re alone and there are no distractions. It comes back, like the words of a children’s song that still has a hold on you.
As a metaphor for memory, “invisible ink” is incredibly apt; what Modiano makes of it here (literally and figuratively) is clever and wise. This is, however, quite a short book (I don’t think it took even two hours to read) and without any bits that jumped out and grabbed me, it just feels thin somehow. And yet: I am totally open to reading more Modiano and discovering how this relates to the whole.
