Travel Writers Online

In 1952, between 23rd and 28th August, Michèle Bernstein spent time in the French port of Le Havre, Normandy seeking out the places that had inspired Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel, Nausea , or so we learn from some fragments left by Patrick Straram, collected together as Les bouteilles se couchent .  The Sartre novel which inspired Michèle Bernstein was from 1938; it was Sartre's first published novel. Sartre set the story in the port city on the estuary of the river Seine in Normandy where he had been a schoolteacher.  Nausea is written as diary entries, with street-names that should be easy to find for any literary dériviste ; in the quotation from Nausea below, the narrator, Antoine Roquentin has just come out of the library. A bronze statue of Gustave Impetraz stands nearby: Thursday, 11.30 I have worked two hours in the reading-room. I went down to the Cour des Hypotheques to smoke a pipe. A square paved with pinkish bricks. The people of Bouville [Le Havre] are proud of it ...

English-language readers will be pleased to hear that another of Patrick Modiano’s novels has been translated from French and is available in the UK. If, like me, and my blog followers, you have become addicted to Modiano’s writing then this next one should be a real treat.  The original French version, called L’herbe des nuits has been around in paperback since May 2014, its literal translation would have been, well, Nights’ Grass , Night Grasses , the story itself holds a clue as the narrator searches for the lost words of a manuscript from the 1960s, one is put in mind of the lines from a poem by Mandelstam:   'What pain - hunting for the lost word, lifting these sore eyelids,   And, with lime in your blood, gathering night grasses for alien tribes'                                     ...