Patrick Modiano’s books are striking for their great precision of place and time: toponymy of cities, especially Paris, its cafés or bars, streets, squares, subway or railway stations, house numbers. Dates, hours… Against this police-record accuracy, the impression of a fog à la Simenon in which people are conjured up, but from what hidden, secret pasts, and for what, louche, projects? They pass each other by, though they look or stare, speak, joke a little, meet again, and come to life in public. These lives have a few zones of contact where little is exchanged or shared. We follow them in different guises, from different viewpoints. They all go missing or fade away in what becomes a fog of time that reminds me of the end of Fellini’s Amarcord. The transformation of pale and mysterious human lives fuses with that of the evolving physical surroundings. Cafés that were cosmopolitan, mysterious, congenial meeting places have become boutiques or agencies. What looked like a motivated pursuit of a where, what, and why dissipates in infinite peregrinations or searches that echo each other. The clash between the precise evocation and the progressive erasure of moments, places, and people creates an emptiness and dislocation, a dark dream from which there is but fleeting moments of wakefulness. Correction: a daze rather than a dream, from which the absent, so near, so close, calls us to emerge.