it’s taken me a while to figure out how to write about this book because, while it kept me quite entranced while i read it the way some european fiction does, it’s also quite difficult to pin down. the narrator is an older man, a writer, who tries to reconstruct a particular time of his youth by using a black notebook he kept at the time. in this particular past period jean was very much taken by a woman called dannie. the black notebook is not a diary but a collection of addresses, phone numbers, places, and some such detritus of urban life. in this way, the black notebook works like memory, with its damning fragmentation, sketchiness, and elusiveness. the book itself is a compilation of long fragments, the large majority of which consists of the recounting of long walks jean and dannie take in various parts of paris, of their sitting at cafés, and, also, or jean's waiting for dannie, who we surmise visits men’s apartments as a prostitute.

dannie is connected to a group of threatening, to jean, algerians who are politically involved (the book takes place just after algeria's liberation from french domination. all through this jean presents himself as a vague and unfocused presence, almost without personality. even though clearly infatuated with dannie, he makes no attempt to be romantic with her and their relationship remains platonic. alone or with dannie, he roams paris night after night, not quite like a lost soul but more like somebody with no particular depth and only one desire – to be with dannie.

i confess a great pleasure in these kinds of books. some french literature, like some french cinema, is almost plotless and much focused on the city (is there any city who lives in the literary mind more powerfully than paris -- at least in the literary mind that reaches us here in the US of A?), its mutations, what is lost and what is gained through the passage of time, the various ways it feels and sounds, its dangers and its loneliness.* this book is also clearly about connecting old age to youth, creating a narrative in which old age follows youth and is not, as it often feels, an entirely new, and diminished, life. yet, in this search for his younger self, older jean can find only his own emptiness, his losses, his lack of understanding of what was really going on at the time, and his own alienation from his past self.

* it's impossible not to think here of the american literature that is infatuated with paris too, from The Sun Also Rises to Giovanni's Room, which also describe long nights and long perambulations, and focus so very much on the city.