In a marvelous phrase, Erich Heller credited Franz Kafka with having achieved “the most obscure lucidity in the history of literature.” Heller’s witty oxymoron could be applied with equal justice to the French writer Patrick Modiano, the author of roughly two dozen novels and novellas and winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature.

When Modiano, born in 1945, received the Nobel, a handful of his books were available in English, but many were not. Thanks to the prize, previously untranslated books appeared in English, and new work was promptly translated by Mark Polizzotti, so there was a consistency in voice.

Ballerina, released in Polizzotti’s English translation in January, is even briefer than most of Modiano’s fiction, but it doesn’t feel skimpy or rushed. The title figure, whose name isn’t given, is a young ballet dancer in Paris with a small son, Pierre, whom the narrator sometimes escorts here or there and spends time with when she is practicing her art. In an unforced way, the narrator is influenced by her commitment to dance, which “enables her to survive.” Except for a short passage near the end, we are never directly privy to her consciousness. Rather, we see her from the narrator’s perspective, in fleeting glimpses of memory decades after the fact.

Readers who don’t care for Modiano might say he keeps writing the same book over and over. The narrator, often first-person, sometimes third-person, revisits a series of episodes in the distant past. A passage from 2021’s Scene of the Crime, published in English translation in 2023, is typical: “In a Montmartre street in those years, he had crossed paths one afternoon with Serge Latour, the man who sang ‘Gentle Lady.’ That encounter — barely a few seconds — had been such a minuscule detail in Bosman’s life that he was amazed it resurfaced in his memory.” What follows is musing about that tiny “encounter,” evanescent, yet haunting enough to make the protagonist “even more sensitive to the dust — or rather the odor — of time.” And from this moment of “obscure lucidity,” the entire short novel flows, at once vivid and fragmentary.

In Ballerina, our narrator is himself an artist in the making, though at first, he doesn’t know it. Almost as if by accident, he finds himself saying “in a firm voice” in response to a question from the ballerina’s dance partner about what he does with his life, “I write books.”

At that point, he hasn’t, in fact, written anything. This is not a romantic “portrait of the artist as a young man.” What has inspired him to lie is that he has just met Maurice Girodias, as Modiano himself did as a young man, who is publishing English-language books that would be banned in Britain. Learning that our hero speaks English, Girodias has “proposed that I work on a book, a typescript of about eighty pages, to which some episodes needed to be added.” After reading the typescript in English, the narrator will write the additional episodes in French, in which he is at home, and Girodias will have them translated into English to incorporate into the text. In the midst of the conversation in which he makes his “firm” but not strictly truthful claim, the narrator has resolved that he will accept the offer made by Girodias. It is an undistinguished start, to put it mildly, but nonetheless the beginning of his career as a writer.

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“What had become of the ballerina and Pierre, and the others I’d gotten to know in that same period?” the narrator muses on the penultimate page of the book, as if anticipating what his readers will be thinking as they come to the end, that this very question is one he is no longer troubled by, as “neither the ballerina nor Pierre belonged to the past but to an eternal present.” He describes how he “used to believe that the memory of them came to me the way light reaches you from a star that died a thousand years ago, as the poet said. But no. There was no past, no dead star, nor any lightyears that forever separate you from one another, but only this eternal present.”

Timebound, I can’t conceive of an “eternal present,” but like others who affirm in their prayers “as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever, Amen,” I have hopes. Our narrator sketches warm and “precise images” he says he keeps. That may be one way of trying to characterize Modiano’s books themselves, which treat both memory and language as something to play around with, almost always with a tremendous payoff for anyone paying close attention.

John Wilson is senior editor of the Marginalia Review of Books.