In his brief, enigmatic account of his first 21 years, Pedigree, Patrick Modiano describes how, in 1959, at the age of 14, when his mother was performing in a play at the Théâtre Fontaine, he began exploring the Pigalle district of Paris. “It was there, on Rue Fontaine, Place Blanche, Rue Frochot, that I first brushed against the mysteries of Paris and, without quite realising it, began dreaming of a life for myself.” Aged 17, he wrote that he was only really happy when he was walking on his own in its streets. Since then, the detailed locations, street names and precise urban geography of the capital have been a feature of virtually everything he has written.

The haunting, melancholy atmosphere of the old working-class quartiers – their cafes, garages, run-down hotels and seedy nightclubs, the dreamlike labyrinth of boulevards, streets, squares, Métro stations – are combined in his novels with echoes of Modiano’s broken and unhappy childhood. A curious cast of mysterious and frequently sinister characters appear and vanish from the narrative for no obvious reason. It is a Paris that recalls, at times, the mood of films such as Marcel Carné’s Sous les Toits de Paris, and at others, the Saint-Germain-des-Prés of the Sartre or Juliette Gréco years.

Les Deux Magots cafe on the boulevard Saint-Germain in 1962: Photograph Roger-Viollet/REX Shutterstock

I have long been addicted to walking the different quartiers of Paris, and still feel a flâneur’s fascination for street names such as Rue Git-le-Coeur, Rue des Mauvais-Garçons and Rue Abbé-de-l’Epée; this, together with an abiding interest in what life in the city must have been like during and immediately after the occupation has made Modiano my ideal author. When the opportunity arose, therefore, to translate his most recent novel, So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighbourhood, as well as his 2007 work, In the Café of Lost Youth, I jumped at the challenge. Recently, I was invited to meet him.

Modiano is now 70 and, one senses, an intensely private and reserved man. Tall, courteous and with a slightly apologetic manner, he uses extravagant hand gestures and is prone to be hesitant or inconclusive in his answers to questions, always searching for le mot juste, and employing ellipses (his favourite punctuation mark), as many of his characters do. In the book-lined study of his apartment near the Jardin du Luxembourg, where he lives with his wife, Dominique, I decided to focus on the topographical aspects of his novels. Was such specific naming of Paris streets and addresses, I wondered, in a world where fictional characters and events are so often mysterious and only dimly remembered, a way of creating atmosphere?

“I use them to try to obtain reference points. Buildings bring back memories and the more precise the setting the better it suits the imagination. As a child and a teenager I was very impressionable ... So forceful are these impressions that one becomes a prisoner of one’s memories. There are images that pursue you all your life ... As a child, my family life was fairly unsettled and I was often left to my own devices. I began to wander through the streets of the city and would feel a mixture of fear and fascination as I forced myself to go further from home each time.”

In his 2010 novel The Horizon, Modiano writes of his principal character, Bosmans, that “he never forgot the names of streets and the numbers of buildings. It was his private way of resisting the indifference and anonymity of large cities, and perhaps too the uncertainties of life.”

'When I first began to wander the streets of the city I would feel a mixture of fear and fascination' Patrick Modiano

In many of Modiano’s novels there are references to invisible frontiers, to “neutral zones”, to hinterlands and no‑man’s lands, and the reader becomes immersed in the bizarre atmosphere of certain quartiers of Paris, where characters are glimpsed as if in a mist. They change their identities and often use pseudonyms, whereas streets, addresses and old-fashioned phone numbers (eg DANton 5561) are absolutely specific. When characters cross the Seine, for example, moods change; when they walk beneath the overhead Métro bridges between Ségur and Dupleix stations, they enter a neutral zone. It is as if Modiano has created a Parisian geography of the mind that, like a palimpsest, is superimposed with his memories over the neighbourhoods themselves.

“I had the impression as a boy that if I crossed the Seine to the Right Bank I was entering a fantasy world that was slightly frightening. Les Halles was there in those days, as were all the newspaper offices, and the Champs-Elysées had something of a seaside feeling ... Whereas the Left Bank was more provincial, though not lacking in charm. Of course, none of this means anything today ... ”

In Night Rounds, “drowned men” glide along the Boulevard Haussmann and the boulevards that dissect the old medieval city; the Rue de l’Aude is full of menace in The Black Notebook and evokes the Paris of the post-Algerian war period; the Place du Panthéon becomes “sinister in the moonlight”. From 93 Rue Lauriston, where the French Gestapo once operated and where “tongues are loosened” in La Place de l’Etoile, his first novel, published in 1968, to the Square de Graisivaudan in his latest work, street names evoke a powerful mood of melancholy – or what the French call grisaille.

Like Baudelaire before him, Modiano profoundly regrets the destruction and passing of areas of old Paris. “In Baudelaire’s time the whole Carrousel area was destroyed. He wrote a poem about it ... nowadays Paris is rather aseptic and everything has become more uniform, yet there is still something strange and mysterious about certain quartiers ...

“... I often have a sense of Paris being covered by a layer of cellophane and I feel as though my own memories have become almost imaginary. It’s rather like a favourite pet – a dog or a cat – that has been stuffed and sent to the taxidermist. You recognise it, but it’s no longer alive.”

Unreliable, uncertain memories recall phantoms from Modiano’s own youth, and these characters often reappear in his work, giving the impression to many that he is writing the same novel over again. It is a point of view he does not deny. “I thought I’d written them in continuous fashion, in successive periods of forgetfulness, but often the same faces, the same names, the same places, the same sentences reoccur from one to another, like the patterns in a tapestry one might have woven when half asleep.”

Barbès-Rochechouart Métro. Photograph: Denis Sinyakov/AFP/Getty Images Photograph: Denis Sinyakov/AFP/Getty Images

“Like all those born in 1945,” Modiano said in his speech to the Swedish Academy in December 2014 after being awarded the Nobel prize in literature, “I am a child of the war, and more specifically, since I was born in Paris, a child who owed his birth to the Paris of the occupation.” These were years brushed aside and quickly forgotten by many of his parents’ generation, and few French writers have explored the realities of the occupation and immediate postwar years quite so poignantly.

Shades of Modiano’s father, Albert, who was arrested as a Jew (though later released) during the second world war and who associated with racketeers and collaborators, and his Belgian-born mother, Louisa Colpeyn, a vedette of the Flemish cinema who died this year, flit through the pages of most of Modiano’s fiction. But, he writes, “Even the photographs of my parents have become photos of imaginary people. Only my brother [whose death, aged 10, had a devastating effect on the writer], my wife and my daughters are real.”

Characters that may be based on his parents appear in most of Modiano’s novels. He admits to a degree of ambiguity in his memory of them. “In a strange way I would rather have met them before I was born. I prefer to think of them as they might have been before they had children.”

Areas such as the Val‑de-Grâce are portrayed in Modiano’s work with wistfulness rather than nostalgia, as is the “Continent Contrescarpe” in the heart of the fifth arrondissement, which he describes in his preface to Hélène Berr’s Journal as “a sort of oasis in Paris” where no evil could infiltrate. Sections of The Black Notebook read like a street guide to the 14th arrondissement. The Rues d’Ulm, Rataud, Claude Bernard, Pierre-et-Marie-Curie form the “scholastic district”; the street that runs through the Montparnasse cemetery and “seems to go on forever” is the Rue Froidevaux and it features prominently in Paris Nocturne, Afterimage and In the Café of Lost Youth; while the narrator of Flowers of Ruin speaks of Saint-Germain-des-Prés as “my former village which I no longer recognise”, a milieu in which most of the cafés that Modiano knew in his youth have long since vanished.

“When I was a child, Saint-Germain was more of a working-class district ... the Rue Dauphine, for example, was quite run-down. War was still close and the streets were rather dark ... ”



When I was a child, Saint-Germain was more of a working-class district – war was still close and the streets were dark Patrick Modiano

In Modiano’s Paris, characters have difficulty recognising the city they once knew – the building of the Boulevard Périphérique, for example, destroyed many of the humble houses, cafes, small hotels and garages of the 18th arrondissement – and with that destruction went the secrets and lives of the largely working-class population that inhabited the area.

The day after we met, I walked from the Place Blanche, an important intersection in so many of Modiano’s novels, up through Pigalle and across the 18th arrondissement to the newly inaugurated Promenade Dora Bruder, a walkway that runs above the overgrown tracks of the now defunct Petite Ceinture railway line, separating Rue Leibniz from Rue Belliard. In June this year, in the author’s presence, Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, unveiled a plaque as a memorial to Dora Bruder – the young girl whose life Modiano researched and who is the subject of what is perhaps his best-loved book (translated into English as The Search Warrant). She lived and went to school in the area before she was deported to Auschwitz in September 1942. However unreliable or fictitious our memories may be, this name, now immortalised on a Paris street sign, has become reality: Bruder and her brief life will never be forgotten and we can remain close to her in time and space.

• Euan Cameron is the translator of Patrick Modiano’s So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighbourhood (MacLehose) and In the Café of Lost Youth (to be published in January)

• This article was amended on 2 November as Sous les Toits de Paris was directed by René Clair, and not Marcel Carné as previously stated.

