As a Nobel Prize winner for literature, you are not spared a lot.

Where someone grew up or spent a certain amount of time in their life, plaques are attached to houses, which is rather harmless.

But now and then people with audio guides wander through the streets and across the places where books are set or where the author liked to hang out.

Peter Korte

Editor in the feuilleton of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper in Berlin.

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For example, you can walk in the footsteps of Patrick Modiano through Jouy-en-Josas, a small town south-west of Paris.

And this literary incorporation can refer to the fact that Modiano spent part of his childhood here.

Modiano is in any case a grateful object for so-called literary walks.

In his novels, he usually names streets, house numbers, metro stations very precisely, often they are also linked to his biography, so that a tourist office cannot resist capitalizing on tourism.

This creates the illusion of entering the world set in a Modiano novel.

The Rue du Docteur de Kurzenne is already known from four novels.

In "On the way to Chevreuse" she now appears for the fifth time.

The reader does not feel at home, but she is familiar.

The narrator is not unknown either.

Jean Bosmans is a writer, he was already the narrator in "Der Horizont" (2010; in German 2013).

A young man, a woman, a secret

It would have been nice to know how things went for him when he wanted to visit a childhood sweetheart at Dieffenbachstrasse 16 in Kreuzberg, who ran a bookshop there;

as he waited, postponed the meeting, on a beautiful, warm summer day in Berlin.

The book then simply ended because Modiano has no such scenes that resemble a closure, and for good reason.

Bosmans spent part of his childhood at 38 Rue du Docteur de Kurzenne, as did Modiano.

When the narrative begins in “On the Road to Chevreuse”, he looks back more than five decades to the 1960s;

his childhood, which also plays an important role, dates back 15 more years.

But the center, the Modiano period, is the mid-1960s, and what is happening is, as is so often the case, linked to Modiano's biography by a thin, associative bond.

It is like a puzzle: the closer you think you are to the similarities, the greater the difference.

Bosmans isn't Modiano, but he's no stranger either.

In "Unterwegs nach Chevreuse", translated as confidently as ever by Elisabeth Edl, everything else that makes up the core of a novel by Patrick Modiano is gathered together.

A young man around 20, who is looking for his way in life, who starts to write;

a woman of the same age with an obscure past;

a number of people engaged in shady dealings that are, as it tersely puts it, "bad company";

and the young man's elder ego looking at that youth, at the Paris of yesteryear, at the mysteries that keep eluding.

Bosmans also slides back and forth between times, he hints – “in one afternoon” – he also names periods of time, 15 or 30 years later, but in this narrative style the times sometimes blur into one another like watercolors on a piece of paper.

Bosmans himself has problems establishing a chronological sequence between certain events, they appear to him simultaneously.

aporias of memory

And he falls into the aporia of memory that can never be resolved: “He wondered whether he had really said at that moment: 'I have never experienced such a beautiful spring in Paris', or whether it was not rather the memory of that spring that made him write these words today, fifty years later.”