PATRICK MODIANO was born in 1945 in a suburb of Paris and grew up in various locations throughout France. In 1967, he published his first novel, La Place de l'étoile, to great acclaim. Since then, he has published over twenty novels—including the Goncourt Prize−winning Rue des boutiques obscures (translated as Missing Person), Dora Bruder, and Les Boulevards des ceintures (translated as Ring Roads)—as well as the memoir Un Pedigree and a children's book, Catherine Certitude. He collaborated with Louis Malle on the screenplay for the film Lacombe Lucien. In 2014, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy cited “the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the Occupation,” calling him “a Marcel Proust of our time.”
So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood
Hardcover
$24.00
- ISBN-13: 9780544635067
- Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- Publication date: 09/15/2015
- Pages: 160
- Product dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d)
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“Modiano is an ideal writer to gorge on . . . A moody, delectable noir.” — The New Yorker “The best kind of mystery, the kind that never stops haunting you.” — Entertainment Weekly “A work of melancholic beauty . . . Sincere, shattering, magnificent.” — L’Express In the stillness of his Paris apartment, Jean Daragane has built a life of total solitude. Then a surprising phone call shatters the silence of an unusually hot September, and the threatening voice on the other end of the line leaves Daragane wary but irresistibly curious. Almost at once, he finds himself entangled with a shady gambler and a beautiful, fragile young woman, who draw Daragane into the mystery of a decades-old murder. The investigation will force him to confront the memory of a trauma he had all but buried. This masterly novel penetrates the deepest enigmas of identity and compels us to ask whether we ever know who we truly are.“Moody . . . Lyrical . . . A pleasure.” — Kirkus Reviews “A writer unlike any other and a worthy recipient of the Nobel.” — Wall Street Journal
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Publishers Weekly
07/06/2015A quietly haunting search for the truth—or at least for the facts—of a postwar French childhood, Nobel-winner Modiano’s novel spins out over a summer in which “everything is uncertain.” The quest begins with a phone call: elderly, isolated writer Jean Daragane has lost his address book on a train, and a man named Gilles Ottolini has found it. Ottolini offers to return the book, but when the two meet in a Paris cafe, he demands information about one of the people listed: Guy Torstel, whose name also appears in one of Jean’s early novels, Le Noir de l’été (The Black of Summer). Although he cannot immediately remember Torstel and is reluctant to engage with the outside world (“in his solitude, he had never felt so light-hearted”), Jean nevertheless finds himself reading through a dossier about a 1951 murder case, given to him by Gilles’s girlfriend, Chantal Grippay, and encountering in these papers names that were once familiar to him, including Torstel. Modiano’s text rewards the patient reader—as this time-hopping account of coincidences, uncertainties, and echoes of a half-forgotten history unfolds, “the present and the past merge together,” building toward a powerful, memorable conclusion. (Sept.)
From the Publisher
"Modiano is an ideal writer to gorge on ... in part because [his books] make up a system as beguiling and complete as any in contemporary literature ... [So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood] set[s] up a moody, delectable noir."—The New Yorker "A suspenseful inquiry into memory and storytelling, including the stories we tell ourselves about our own lives. It’s the best kind of mystery, the kind that never stops haunting you. A–."—Entertainment Weekly "[Modiano's] fiction resonates so deeply [because] it occupies an elusive middle ground between place and personality ... Resonant ... Compelling."—Los Angeles Times "Euan Cameron's atmospheric translation does ample justice to this spectral tale."—Independent "There is intrigue, there are missing persons, there are affairs of the heart and body ... The beauty of [Modiano's] prose shines once again in this deep, short read."—Paste "Moody ... Lyrical ... Vintage Modiano, and a pleasure for fans of neonoir fiction."—Kirkus Reviews
Library Journal
★ 09/01/2015Published in France in 2014, this novel is billed as suspense, though it's suspense of a very different order from that of your standard cloak-and-daggers thriller. Jean Daragane, a novelist who prizes his solitude, receives a call from a stranger who says he has found Daragane's address book. When he goes to retrieve it, Daragane starts worrying that the shady Gilles Ottolini means to blackmail him (even Ottolini's companion, Chantal, warns him later that Ottolini is dangerous). But what Ottolini really wants is information about Guy Torstel, whose name is in the address book. At first, Daragane doesn't recall Torstel, but the name—and a dossier given him by Chantal—slowly awakens memories of a house where he stayed as a child in Saint-Leu-la-Fôret and the young woman named Annie who cared for him. Daragane still aches for Annie, yet it's also clear that she's associated with some sort of crime in his young life, a crime Modiano reveals in the end not with a bang but in his typically delicate and elliptical way. VERDICT More fleshed out than Modiano's mid-career novels yet retaining their not-quite-touchable qualities, this won't work for anyone who wants robust emotion but is brilliantly structured and effectively captures the unflashy unease of real life.[See Prepub Alert, 3/30/2015.]—BH
Kirkus Reviews
2015-07-01Claustrophobic, moody, none-more-noir novel by French Nobel Prize winner Modiano (Suspended Sentences, 2014, etc.).Phone calls don't happen often in Jean Daragne's world. He's sealed himself off in a Paris apartment, shutters drawn always, but especially now during an unusually strong heat wave that "emphasized his loneliness." Still, he goes out from time to time, losing his address book on one small excursion away from his study. Therein lies the rub, for now his phone is ringing, and on the other end is a voice insistently offering to return his contacts to him. But why does the caller want to know about a character who, we learn in painstakingly deliberate time, figures in a novel that Daragne wrote years earlier and had forgotten about? Indeed, Daragne has forgotten a great deal that Gilles Ottolini, small-time crook and erstwhile jockey, would like to remind him of, not least a murder that took place more than half a century earlier. Modiano writes tantalizingly, offering just a part of a detail here and another there, inviting the reader to participate in Daragne's bewilderment (Why him? Why now?), the unfolding identities of the players (Is Ottolini a blackmailer? Is Chantal a femme fatale or a pawn? Just what is the relationship between Annie Astrand and the perhaps half-American Roger Vincent?), and the hallucinatory stroll into a past that constantly raises as many questions as it answers. Modiano blends elements of the procedural, the ghost story, and the existentialist novels of his youth to unpeel an extremely juicy onion at whose core, in the end, would seem to be a meditation on the nature of memory and storytelling alike: "Perhaps he had gathered together all these disparate elements in the hope that Daragne would react to one of them…." Lyrical and portentous—and sometimes even "dreary and threatening," as Daragne describes the voice at the other end of the line. Vintage Modiano, and a pleasure for fans of neonoir fiction.