"Missing, a young girl, Dora Bruder, age 15, height 1.55 m, oval-shaped face, grey-brown eyes, grey sports jacket, maroon pullover, navy-blue skirt and hat, brown gym shoes. Address all information to M. and Mme Bruder, 41 Boulevard Ornano, Paris."The above was printed in "Paris Soir" dated 31 December 1941. What catches Modiano's interest are the finer details - say, her height was 1.55 m. No more no less. He embarks on a search that lasts longer than a decade, is interjected by other crucial events in his life, the writing and publication of his books for instance, and by the time he thinks he has gathered enough material about Dora Bruder he decides to tell it, in a subdued tone socked in memory. The obvious question is: why search for a girl who may clearly be dead? What would one end up finding anyway? We don't get the answers from Modiano. Instead, he begins with a very neat, decent paragraph that has more to do with his musings on the address of the Bruder dwelling:"I had long been familiar with the area around the Boulevard Ornano. As a child, I would accompany my mother to the Saint-Ouen flea markets." This writer knows his city well, too well in fact. For the first few pages he exhausts the reader with all the references of the city, this street, that street, there was a hotel here, there was a theater on the other side that was later renovated, and suchlike. Take this para:"The last café at the top of Boulevard Ornano on the right was called the 'Verse Toujours'. There was another, on the left, at the corner of the Boulevard Ney, with a jukebox. The Ornano-Championnet crossroads had a chemist and a couple of cafés, the one on the corner of the Rue Duhesme being the older of the two." This is a search back in time, about how things were, and the only clues available are newspaper clips, government records, old photographs found at unlikely places, and the ever-changing city that knows Dora's secret. I like to believe that Modiano is influenced by the detective genera because this story is framed like one - heck its not even a story! It is prose in the manner of Modiano - that is the best way I have of describing the search for Dora that turns into a mediation on the nature of time, on the lives lost during the occupation, peppered with auto-biographical accounts. It was difficult for me to keep track of all the geographical references he throws at you because I have never been to Paris or know anything at all about its landmarks. At one point he talks about his relationship with his father. There is an interesting incident which is described in wikipedia as follows: "Earlier while stranded in Paris during the Algerian war, Modiano had asked his father for little financial assistance but his father called the police." A detailed version of it is described by Modiano in the book, but here too he is not concentrating on the strain in their relationship. His telling of it is totally unemotional and practical. What he focuses on is the street they both took once the police released them. This incident dates back to the 60s. Interestingly, his father had walked alone on the same street, when he was young, when he was released by the police after being arrested in similar circumstances. That was way back in the 40s. When they are both alone on the deserted street, walking side by side, none uttering a single word, this is the kind of moment when a son would ask his father: "why? why this grudge against me?" Instead, Modiano wants to know whether his father is thinking of that night when he was young and walking alone on the same street they are walking on now. My take is that time has healed the wounds and for Modiano, writing this book in the 90s, the ultimate question as he remembers that vague episode from the 60s is this: what was going on in my father's head? The same curiosity is at work when he searches for Dora. By charting the changing city, the exhausting geography of it, he is bringing out something that cannot be found in any official record. After having read the book I am quite aware of Dora's becoming and the chronology of events that led to it. But not everything is clear. There is also a moving sequence when Modiano simply puts the actual letters written by family members of the Jews who were deported to camps like Auschwitz. The letters form the part of his search for Dora and we realize what he is aiming for. Cutting through the fog of history and time he is reaching back to a place that has preserved loss in its totality. Because that is what remains when the narration is over: a resounding sense of loss.The Nobel Prize website claims the following reason for awarding him the prize: "for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation". I wonder whether they have "Dora Bruder" in mind, or do all his books function like this one does? I want to read "Missing Person" as soon as possible, before my sudden interest in Patrick Modiano fizzles out.
Under the heading "From Yesterday to Today" in a Paris newspaper a brief notice concerning a missing fifteen year old Jewish girl attracts the narrator's attention. Why is he interested in the case of the missing girl? The notice is from December 1941 at the time of the German Occupation of Paris and parts of France. The girl's name is Dora Bruder. Written in the first person, the author is drawing us into the story, almost despite ourselves. Something has triggered the narrator's memory. He is familiar with the address given in the ad; he knows the environment. Through a journey into the past, a search that, on and off, lasts decades the protagonist creates an almost physical portrait of Dora like a complicated jigsaw puzzle, one piece or clue at a time. Where facts are missing he carefully imagines them, and, sometimes, by coincidence, finds them later to add to the portrait. "One tells oneself that at least the places retain a light imprint of the people who lived in them."Who is the Dora Bruder of the novel's title? Why should we know about her, and what, if anything at all? Did she exist in reality or is she a composite creation formed in the mind of the author? Who is the protagonist? It could be Patrick Modiano himself, writing from his own knowledge and experience and reviving his own memories in a kind of fictionalized autobiography, or 'autofiction'. Where is the fine line between reality and fiction here? Does it matter if the story's inner logic is preserved? Born in 1945, a couple of month after the end of the war, much of what the narrator knows comes from his father's generation. Yet, the imprints of the past are there to be explored. From the beginning all the way to the end, the author applies the skills of a meticulous detective, who refuses to give up in his search for information. At times, he despairs with the lack of clues. For example it takes him four years to establish Dora's date of birth, many more years to establish details of her and her family's fate. He is very concerned that the memory of their fate and that of many others in their situation is getting lost over time if persons like himself don't preserve the knowledge of their existence: "Dora's parents are the kind of people who leave few traces behind them. Almost anonymous. They don't detach themselves from certain Paris streets, from certain landscape in the banlieu, where I have discovered by chance, that they have lived." Conscious of time, he states elsewhere: "From yesterday to today. With the passing of time, the perspectives blur for me, the winters mix one into the others. That of 1965 and that of 1942.” Modiano persists in his search over decades, driven by a deep personal emotional attachment, admitting his own obsession with the object of his search as if he were somebody as close as a mourning family member. He brings his intimate and precise knowledge of place and time to bear that increasingly involves us also into the story. His familiarity not only with the district, where he has lived himself as a child, the streets, the buildings standing then (destroyed since) and even the house where Dora's family lived brings him to reflect on his own experiences and memories. He is sensitive to the coincidences that present themselves and follows up on them to advance his research and understanding of Dora. There is more to this urge for comprehending this particular period of Paris history, a very personal one… Walking through the streets decades later, he can still sense, almost visualize scenes from the past: the dead leave imprints on the walls that he can detect, almost touch. However, the dead don't give up all their secrets. Finishing the book the question whether Dora was one individual or a composite portrait did no longer matter to me. She will remain in my memory as a person, one that stands for many whose stories we do not know.Patrick Modiano, an award winning author in France, has only recently come to international attention with winning the Nobel Prize for Literature 2014. Those who are familiar with his writing - most of his sizeable collection of novels and other works have yet to be translated into English - know about the primary theme that underlies his fiction: life in Paris and environs under the German Occupation in the 1940s. In France he is also a foremost representative of the literary genre of "autofiction". His book, Dora Bruder, published in 1997, is an excellent example of this kind of writing. It will not suit everybody, but once you are open to his way of writing, you will read more books by him. I read this novel in the original F
Do You like book Dora Bruder (1999)?
Fifteen-year-old Dora Bruder didn't survive the Holocaust. Neither did her mother or father. Forget the heroic stories of the French Resistance. Here is the true face of France during World War 2. At no point in this brief, tragic book did poor Dora Bruder, lost to the conflagration of the Holocaust, come into contact with Germans. Not until the doors of the train she was riding in opened in Auschwitz, that is.A French policeman randomly stopped her on the street to check if she was Jewish; a French policeman registered her name on a list of Jews in France; A French policeman sent her to a holding pen for Jews; a French policeman signed papers that transferred her to Drancy; French policemen put her in a train headed for Auschwitz and bolted the door. None of these Frenchman would have gassed her themselves, I am sure. But each of them was willing to register her name in a book, to fill out a form, to write her name on an index card, to pass a defenseless teenage girl on to the next office, the next department, a process that ended in the gas chamber. After the war, the French destroyed almost every paper and piece of evidence connecting them to these horrifying and shameful crimes against humanity. They even tore down the run-down neighborhood where Dora, and others like her, lived. Fortunately, a few files escaped notice, which is why Patrick Modiano was able to reconstruct these glimpses into one ordinary Jewish girl's catastrophe.Dora Bruder will tell you all you need to know about the banality of evil.
—Helen
Um dia, ao ler um jornal datado de 31 de dezembro de 1941, o narrador/autor, depara-se com a seguinte notícia:“Paris:Procura-se uma rapariga, Dora Bruder, 15 anos, 1m 55, rosto oval, olhos cinzento-acastanhados, casaco desportivo cinzento, camisola em tom bordeaux, saia e chapéu azul-marinho, sapatos leves castanhos. Endereçar todas as indicações ao Sr. E à Srª Bruder, Alameda Ornano, nº41, Paris.”Desde esse dia, tentou reconstruir a história desta jovem judia, até aos seus momentos finais em Auchwitz.“É preciso muito tempo para que surja à luz o que foi apagado(…). Basta um pouco de paciência”
—Ana
A book about the disappearance of a Jewish teenager, Dora Bruder, and her parents, in Paris during the Second World War. It records the author's "search" for any trace of her. The (implied) author is also the narrator and becomes a character in his own story as he becomes engrossed in searching for hers. The book is a very Parisian experience. Modiano says he is able to trace back the addresses where the family had lived. However, he continues: "And such topographical precision contrasts with what we shall never know about their life - this blank, this mute block of the unknown." (p. 23) Every street, every street corner has a special significance that streets normally do not have in other big cities, maybe because so many of the streets are associated with some gruesome act in French history. As if the streets the city were a map of the repressed memories of the entire nation, in which the Bruder family played a part.
—Jonathan Widell
