Catherine Certitude by Patrick Modiano/jean-Jacques sempé (1988)

www.amazon.ca

 While browsing through the Toronto Public Library’s Award-Winners page, the name of the Nobel Prize in Literature winner for 2014 jumped out at me: Patrick Modiano. I looked at the titles of his available at the TPL and a cheerfully illustrated front cover caught my eye, that of Catherine Certitude. When I clicked on the link to the book’s page, I saw that it was illustrated by Jean-Jacques Sempé, whose humorous illustrations made Le petit Nicolas (René Goscinny) immortal. I immediately clicked “Place hold.”
 
Sometimes I don’t have the courage to dive headfirst into a great author’s oeuvre, so for me, this little volume of only 95 pages, with lots of pictures, seemed just right for my September teacher-brain. Besides, this book is one part of the reason Modiano won the Nobel Prize, and as I read it, I began to understand why.

He won “for his art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and unveiled the life-world of the occupation.”

www.theparisreview.org

Catherine Certitude is one of those parenthetical stories that starts with the narrator as an adult remembering childhood and closes with one reflection that ties it all together. Many elements that recur in Modiano’s books are found in miniature here, too:

• Shady dealings: Georges Certitude’s somewhat shady dealings, as well as his rescue from the law by a friend, mirror Modiano’s own father’s life.
• Catherine’s age: the same as Modiano’s brother when he died
• Parents who have separated and later maintain a fragile peace
• A disastrous cocktail party
• The streets of Paris
• The concept of identity and names
• The concept of what is real and not-real

 
So Catherine Certitude is a distillation of all of Patrick Modiano’s great themes in a beautiful, deftly written children’s story.
 
I think it would make a great read-aloud for girls around age 8-10 who are interested in ballet, in France, or in father-daughter stories. There are many nuances which the older reader will have to interpret for the younger.