Review by Booklist Review
In the latest work of French novelist Modiano, the narrator, Jean Bo, is a middle-aged maker of documentary films who has traveled the world. The day arrives--as he knew it would--when his globe-trotting life with his wife loses all meaning, and Jean seeks anonymity in the suburbs of Paris. There he passes time alone and in silence, slipping easily between the past and the present. And in avoiding the future, Jean tries to determine exactly when it was that summer lost its lightness and began to give him a "sense of emptiness and absence." His reverie, which is the novel, consists mostly of composing a mental obituary for a woman he met 20 years earlier, during World War II. Her tale, revealed carefully over the length of the narrative, is a beautiful example of Modiano's fluid storytelling and his ability to move seamlessly between Paris and the Cote d'Azur, childhood and adulthood, peacetime and wartime. ~--Kathryn Broderick
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
$19.95. F A winner of France's prestigious Prix Goncourt, Modiano is the author of 17 novels as well as the screenplay for Louis Malle's noteworthy film, Lacombe Lucien. In this slight but probing novel, a middle-aged man decides to take a ``honeymoon.'' Scheduled to fly to Brazil on a job, documentary filmmaker Jean B. instead slips away to Milan and then returns to a Parisian suburb. There he attempts to trace the life and death (by suicide) of a woman named Ingrid, whom he met while hitchhiking to Saint-Tropez. World War II is raging, and Ingrid, who is traveling with her husband, clearly has something to hide. Ingrid's mystery is not rewardingly played out, but Modiano is a wonderfully evocative writer--there's a nice touch of menace throughout, and the cool, collected writing feels like a salve. For literary collections.-- Barbara Hoffert, ``Library Journal'' (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Brooding, philosophically rich novel by Modiano (Missing Person, 2014, etc.), recipient of the 2014 Nobel Prize in literature. Jean B. is a filmmakera documentary filmmaker, more precisely, and one constantly on the go from continent to continent and culture to culture: "I was just back from Oceania," he recalls, "and I was to leave for Rio de Janeiro a few days later." This tour finds him on a short layover in Milan while traveling to Paris by trainand everyone knows that you don't go to Milan in August, when everyone is gone or hiding from the heat. Apparently the heat is too much, or something is too much in any event, for another traveler, Ingrid Theysen, who, Jean learns, killed herself a couple of days earlier after drinking just the same drink he has now ordered. It's not the drink's fault but instead the weight of the whole oppressive 20th century: the war, the occupation, the whole bit. The thing is, Jean knew Ingrid two decades earlier, when she'd brightly said, "We'll pretend to be dead." Why should Ingrid want to do so? What secret did she holdand how about Rigaud, the fellow whom she'd run off with during the war, leaving it to her poor parents to place advertisements begging for information about their missing daughter? Modiano is in high mystery mode as Jean sets out to retrace Ingrid's steps past "groups of German soldiers and French policemen," hugging the walls while trying to avoid being seen. And why? Well, there's the nub, and Modiano takes his time solving the puzzle and then not filling in every blanknot least the one that might tell us why Jean should be interested in the first place. Along the way, he coolly evokes the black-and-white grittiness of France in the early 1960s, when so many were trying to forget the events of 20 years before, and leaves much of the rest to the reader's imagination. Trademark Modiano, brittle and elegant, with more questions than answers. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
