Modiano's novels are full of dates. The narrators seem to take much pleasure in specifying precisely when certain events took place, whether in their own lives or in someone else's. Chapters and paragraphs frequently start with a date reference: ‘Hier, 1er octobre de dix-neuf cent quatre-vingt quatorze, je suis revenu chez moi, de la place d'Italie, par le métro.’ Or: ‘J'ai connu Francis Jansen quand j'avais dix-neuf ans, au printemps de 1964 …' These are especially useful given that Modiano's novels all deal with explorations into the past, various levels of the past, made accessible through long flashbacks. The typical Modiano narrative generally works on three or more of these ‘levels’: the narrative of Fleurs de ruine, for instance, moves back and forth between a pre-war period (1933), the narrator's post-war childhood, and the tale of his late adolescence in the early 1960s.

Yet a reading of a Modiano novel leaves the reader with the overall impression that chronology, although definitely there, is curiously redundant. In Voyage de noces, for example, 1942 presents itself to the reader as a past no further away than the more recent level of 1968; it does not feel more distant. It is as if the different chronological levels are situated on a single plane, on which they enjoy an unhierarchical and interdependent existence. This impression of redundant chronology is not an obvious one, unlike the experimental subversion of conventional time that occurs in certain nouveaux romans. The subversion, if that is what it is, is far more discreet, as it occurs within the framework of a conventional dating system. How can we account for this unusual representation of time, simultaneously absent and present, in Modiano's novels?

The order in which events are told in a narrative is clearly crucial to the sense of time which governs it, but this is dependent on what kind of narrative is under discussion.