Texas: The Great Theft, by Carmen Boullosa

It's been almost a month since I finished a book. I started three books in that space of time. One I read for just a day before deciding it wasn't what I was in the mood for. The second book I read for nearly two weeks. I found I wasn't much in the mood to read it either, but I actually set it aside because Texas: The Great Theft was my next book club book. This book, too, I wasn't often in the mood to read. I was lucky that our book club meeting got pushed back a week (it's this coming Tuesday) or I might not have finished it in time – or even at all for that matter. The truth is, it's not quite accurate to say that I wasn't "in the mood" to read these books individually; I wasn't in the mood for reading. The last month work has been overwhelming, and there's been other stuff going on keeping me preoccupied, and – from time to time – I've also wanted to get outside. I've been going for walks! Today it rained and I went a 5 mile walk yesterday, so it was a good day to stay home and read and cook and watch a movie and just do a lot of things I haven't been up for the last few weeks. 

Anyway, Texas. I think I would have loved this book if I had been in a different place – mentally – while reading it. I did sort of love it, but I kept losing the thread because I would read a few pages one day, then not read for a few days, then go back and read a few more. There are dozens of characters, many with very small parts, in Texas and I would forget who was who in the gaps in my reading. Texas is a fictionalized account of the Cortina Wars of 1859, when a band of militants led by Nepomuceno tried to retake the city of Brownsville from the relatively new US state of Texas. The book is written entirely in the present tense, which gives it the quality of a play-by-play narration. Most of the first 180 pages take place on a single day, when the events that set off the Cortina Wars took place. In fact, a good chunk of those 180 pages don't detail the events themselves, but how news of them passed from person to person and place to place. The latter 100 pages pick up 6 weeks later when the skirmishes really get underway. Reading Texas, I felt very uninformed about Texas history. I had faint memories from high school (or middle school?) history class, but no solid understanding of its history as an independent republic or its transition to statehood. 

There was some real beauty in the book. Boullosa has a way of going into the minds of characters (and animals, and even objects) and exposing the small detail that defines the character (or animal, or object), all in just a few sentences. This was my favorite things about the book. I wish I had read it at a time when I was able to give it more attention. 

In the Café of Lost Youth, by Patrick Modiano

In the 1956 Jean-Pierre Melville film "Bob le Flambeur," there's a scene of the early morning streets of Paris. Bob has been out all night and emerges into the daylight, confronted by the morning newspaper deliveries and the trucks spraying water to clean the streets. I've always loved that scene in the film, and when I imagine Paris, it's often that Paris that I imagine. That Paris is the world of In the Café of Lost Youth. (I almost wrote that Paris is the world of Modiano, but having only read three of his books, I don't feel I have quite the authority to speak on that.)

In the Café of Lost Youth is about a troubled young woman, nicknamed Louki. We learn about her in glimpses through the eyes of different narrators, a young man who has seen her at a café they both frequent, a private investigator her husband has hired to track her down, herself, and her lover. As a girl she started sneaking out in the night and walking the streets of Paris. Eventually, she never goes back home. She is probably still a teenager when she starts frequenting all-night cafés, drinking with older men. She develops a fascination with science fiction, and then perhaps with the occult. Even when we hear her own voice telling us her story, it's defined more by what it doesn't tell than what it does. She remains a mystery, to those who knew her, to the reader.

I'm sure I've said this every time I've written about a Modiano book, but the mood of his books goes right to my core. It's this beautiful nostalgia, with an interplay of present observations of a remote past. The books are as much about memory itself as they are about the events they describe in the past. (At least this book didn't mention the Place Malesherbes!) 

I kept coming back in my mind to "Bob le Flambeur" while reading In the Café of Lost Youth. It takes place in the same neighborhoods (I should say arrondissements). Cafés from the movie show up in the book. And Louki. I couldn't not imagine her as the teenage Isabelle Corey — Anne in the film. This book was written in 2007. Maybe Modiano was imagining her too.