My notebooks are black. All except the one bought from the stationery shop in Valparaiso which is bright yellow. There wasn’t much choice. Not unless I was willing to deal with squares, and I wasn’t. Unlike the protagonist in Modiano’s novella – can you call something shorter than two hundred pages a novel? – the protagonist who writes lists of names – people, streets, buildings or really anything that will fit into an unexpected list – I have failed to record many of the names that illustrate my days in my black notebooks. The yellow notebook does worse than the black ones. I bought it at a point where I had time on my hands and its records fall in the crack between truth and lie. This is not important. What I’m trying to write about is Modiano’s The Black Notebook and in all honesty, even though the notebook is mentioned every few pages or so, the notebook itself is irrelevant to the book. The book is an excuse for Modiano to write Modiano.

Jean, the protagonist – who is Patrick in Family Record or whichever of the other French-named Modiano protagonists who wander through Paris overly late at night in their youth and later become a writer – Jean could never be a woman. This, in the same way as how Cortázar’s Horacio Oliveira in his novel Hopscotch could never be a woman. We women have to be taken out late at night and escorted home. If, in the film, Midnight in Paris, the male protagonist, Gil, had been a woman, then his fiancé (assuming still a heterosexual relationship) would have questioned her walking the streets of a foreign city past midnight, alone. As he is a man, nobody seems all that much concerned.

To walk such streets alone as a woman is irresponsible. Especially poorly lit city streets. And yet it’s exactly such streets that hold a certain literary charm. It’s the edge, the faded light and the blurred shadows which make it so fascinating. Modiano writes what Edward Hopper painted in his 1942 painting, Nighthawks. It’s a world just past closing time. It’s not a world of busy bars and nightclubs, but the public bus station at two o’clock in the morning when few people are around. You’ve begun to sober up. You’ve been elsewhere, perhaps eaten, or not eaten, although even if you’ve not eaten much, you don’t notice the sensation of hunger because your mind is elsewhere. Floating. Life stretches out in front of you; there’s a long walk home.