Im Café der verlorenen Jugend

by Patrick Modiano, Elisabeth Edl (Translator)

Schon als junges Mädchen ist Louki aus der Wohnung der Mutter, einer Platzanweiserin im Moulin Rouge, immer wieder weggelaufen. Den Vater hat sie nie gesehen. Ihren Mann, einen wohlsituierten Immobilienmakler, verließ sie ein Jahr nach der Heirat wieder. Sie verkehrt in einem esoterischen Zirkel, schnupft mit einer Freundin ab und zu ein bisschen »Schnee« und verliebt sich schließlich in den angehenden Schriftsteller Roland. Gemeinsam streifen sie tagelang durch die große Stadt. Im Café Le Condé, dem »Café der verlorenen Jugend« in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, glaubt Louki Zuflucht zu finden, während der Detektiv ihres Mannes schon ihre Spur aufgenommen hat.

Genres: Fiction, France, Classics, Nobel Prize, French Literature, Literature, Novels

158 pages, Paperback

First published October 4, 2007

About the author

Patrick Modiano is a French-language author and playwright and winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature.

He is a winner of the 1972 Grand prix du roman de l'Académie française, and the 1978 Prix Goncourt for his novel "Rue des boutiques obscures".

Modiano's parents met in occupied Paris during World War II and began a clandestine relationship. Modiano's childhood took place in a unique atmosphere: with an absent father -- of which he heard troubled stories of dealings with the Vichy regime -- and a Flemish-actress mother who frequently toured. His younger brother's sudden death also greatly influenced his writings.

While he was at Henri-IV lycee, he took geometry lessons from writer Raymond Queneau, who was a friend of Modiano's mother. He entered the Sorbonne, but did not complete his studies.

Queneau, the author of "Zazie dans le métro", introduced Modiano to the literary world via a cocktail party given by publishing house Éditions Gallimard. Modiano published his first novel, "La Place de l’Étoile", with Gallimard in 1968, after having read the manuscript to Raymond Queneau. Starting that year, he did nothing but write.

On September 12, 1970, Modiano married Dominique Zerhfuss. "I have a catastrophic souvenir of the day of our marriage. It rained. A real nightmare. Our groomsmen were Queneau, who had mentored Patrick since his adolescence, and Malraux, a friend of my father. They started to argue about Dubuffet, and it was like we were watching a tennis match! That said, it would have been funny to have some photos, but the only person who had a camera forgot to bring a roll of film. There is only one photo remaining of us, from behind and under an umbrella!" (Interview with Elle, 6 October 2003). From their marriage came two girls, Zina (1974) and Marie (1978).

Modiano has mentioned on Oct 9, 2014, during an interview with La Grande Librairie, that one of the books which had a great impact on his writing life was 'Le cœur est un chasseur solitaire' (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter), the first novel published by Carson McCullers in 1940.

(Arabic: باتريك موديانو)

Reviews

[Mutasim Billah · Rating 4 out of 5]

"There were two entrances to the café, but she always opted for the narrower one hidden in the shadows."

Paris, 1950s. We're inside a café called Condé. Bohemian youth and some older men form the crowd of this Condé, where our central character walks in. She's a young lady, mysterious, elegant and awkwardly quiet in her ways. The regulars at the café call her Louki, but no one apparently knows her real name.



Where did Louki come from? What was her past like? What is with this enigma surrounding her? It appears that no one really knows.

In the Café of Lost Youth is a glimpse into post-war France, when celebrations and parties are galore. Bohemians come up with fresh perspectives and ideologies to define the new times. We walk among drunks, shady detectives, gangsters and junkies. We drift from alley to alley, walking along the streets of a Paris long lost in time. The story constantly reminds us of the cruel hand time plays to our urban souvenirs. Cafés and apartments lost in time, replaced by new shops and labels without a trace from their past. An ephemera of urban existence.



The story is told from the perspectives of four different narrators, each of them with their own degree of mystery. Louki is one of the narrators, recounting chapters of her past with a certain vagueness that continues the foggy train of thought of the novel.

"In this life that sometimes seems to be a vast, ill-defined landscape without signposts, amid all of the vanishing lines and the lost horizons, we hope to find reference points, to draw up some sort of land registry so as to shake the impression that we are navigating by chance. So we forge ties, we try to find stability in chance encounters."

The story explores a theme where every character's journey is essential marked with a start and and end point with many such reference points in between. The story also explains a concept of "neutral" zones.

"There was a series of transitional zones in Paris, no-man’s-lands where we were on the border of everything else, in transit, or even held suspended. Within, we benefited from a certain kind of immunity."

These zones are continuously referred to, along with references to Nietzche's Eternal Recurrence, giving a notion that our fates are inescapable. As usual, Modiano brings Paris to life in his story, writing about it like a living, breathing mechanism where the lifeblood are the people, the characters drifting throughout time.

[Lucy Dacus · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hard to get Frencher than Modiano. I loved living in the atmosphere in this book, but if it had been any longer I think I would've lost interested. About a third of the book is street names. Every time I thought the story was about to bloom, it shrunk up again.

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

“She had known right from the outset that things would turn out badly for us.”

Young, disaffected students along with the failed and weary are the patrons of the cafe Condé—collectively known as “the lost Youth,” gathering throughout day and night to pass time.
War is over, there is a new calm throughout Paris, but meaning has been drained from life, and lost souls seem to be in every direction. But then there’s Louki to provide a pick-me-up, young, elegant, mysterious and heavenly quiet. Who is she?, where does she come from? who's the brown-haired guy in the suede jacket?

With a minor obsession a small number of the Condé crowd look back on the past with bittersweet sadness around the time she entered their lives, touched in one way or another little does Louki realise just the effect she had on this band of patrons. Louki’s identity, always hazy, takes clearer form as the slender narrative progresses towards a most tragic end. Some of the entanglements feel like floating on air, whilst others have a more deep and meaningful purpose. Central to the novel is the circle run by the now canonical philosopher Guy Debord, whose double in this novel is himself obsessed by the escapist novel Lost Horizons. Modiano casts a spell of deft touches, on themes of intellectual despair and nostalgia but never crosses the border into a darker bleakness. More so, he writes with a passion for memory, impression, and our cursed inability to truly know what reality is, to say nothing of the person across the table from us, while drawing your own sharp picture as to who they are.

Paris becomes a character in it's own right, but it feels more a Paris off the beaten track and by the still of night, evoking tenderness as one looks at the sad characters, lonely journeys, that last metro, empty wide boulevards, and late night rendezvous, he uses the city to complement the tone of the novel to perfection.

Modiano's few characters tip toed through my consciousness like despondent ghosts pining for their lives again, searching for that longing, sifting through thoughts of a departed adolescence, craving for what once was.

This is how to write of melancholy and human destinies, and he pulls it of remarkably well. 4.5

[Jim Fonseca · Rating 4 out of 5]

The focus is initially on a group of Paris café regulars; men and women, all between the ages of 19 and 25. Three older men hang out with the group.

The young people may or may not be students – they drink too much even for students. The motherly café owner thinks of them as stray dogs and muses “things will turn out badly for them.” One of the older men says “I didn’t have high hopes for their futures.”



A mysterious young woman, habitually alone in the cafe, is invited into the group. They give her the name 'Louki,' and it sticks – they never know or care what her real name is. The story’s focus shifts to her.

It turns out Louki was one of those beautiful young women who at 15 looked 20. She never knew her father. Her mother, a dancer at Moulin Rouge, leaves her daughter home alone each night until the wee hours of the morning. At that early age Louki starts going off on her own into the Paris night scene.


The story begins when we learn that Louki has left her husband (older, wealthy, adoring, boring). The private investigator hired by her husband to find Louki starts falling in love with her.

Both Louki and the PI are rootless with no moorings and, it’s as if their concern for landmarks and neighborhoods of Paris substitute as a way of grounding themselves in something. One of the characters implies this and the author is famous for his local color of Paris. We get street names, plazas, how buildings disappeared or were re-purposed and how neighborhoods have changed or stayed the same. How a café located in one neighborhood really “belongs” in another.

A week or so ago I posted a review of another one of Modiano’s novels called Young Once. I didn’t rate that one very highly because I felt it was a bit unfinished. But it’s as if Young Once was a preliminary sketch or a rough draft for Café of Lost Youth which is much more developed and has much better writing. There are a lot of similarities in the two novels. For example, in Young Once we learn that the two main characters, a man and a woman are both 35. In Café, they are not that old but we learn they were born within a month of each other.



A good novel with good writing from a Nobel prize winner. I have read and reviewed several other novels by Patrick Modiano. Links to my other reviews are below:

So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood

Young Once

Honeymoon

Black Notebook

Cafe in Monmatre from flickr.com
Photo by Vanni Bassetti on wwd.com
The author from irishtimes.com

[Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs · Rating 4 out of 5]

Patrick Modiano faces life honestly and unabashedly. By beating an honest retreat from it. He views it from the Wrong End of the Telescope!

Missing Person was, on the surface, a mystery. And the double meaning that catapulted that book into winning a Nobel Prize was the interpretation that it simultaneously zeroes in on solving the mystery of Modiano's own lost self.

He was like me. With vivid childhood trauma, I retreated into Autism. I lost track of my self, and unhappily - facing the world, head on - eventually recovered it in the wrong way. Not Modiano, and that's key to the meaning of Missing Person. For there he shows that lost self to have been valueless.

But Modiano's lost self, Roland in Lost Youth, is also a traumatized self. I believe he is a fellow Aspie. And seeing that's one of the last steps to true emptiness.

In this novel, the runaway anguished girl Louki has gravitated "as if by a magnet" to Paris' rundown Cafe of Lost Youth.

She's lost herself. But then thinks she's found it, in a kinda magic.

And then she disappears.
***

Once again, a mystery.

From the mystery of coming of age to -

Well, Another Mystery.

And new mystery will always follow upon the heels of old mystery in this book, and to Louki it is all the endless folds of the Eternal Return. We are caught in an endless loop, of times, places and characters. And mysteries.

You just can't nail this novel down to specifics. Any specifics. As in Beckett.

Where did Louki’s Self go? It disappeared along with her pain in the presence of company. Now she herself, alone, has lost track - she's off wandering, untouched, voiceless in this much travelled realm of mourning one's Lost Youth.

At one point, Modiano's gumshoe takes over. Things seem to gel, a bit. And when police question her we start to get somewhere.

But no. This book’s an endless procession of formless wanderers. And Louki, like them, keeps drifting further into the Open Sea.

"Nothing happens, nothing really changes," as Sartre says: "life mirrors death and death mirrors life." If you must find a secure reference point in Louki's life, you simply won't. Nothing registers for her but the Void and the Eternal Return, as it seems also to be the case now with the author.

Louki is in fact alive. In body. But her soul is endlessly unstill. Whether she's "here, there or elsewhere. In (her) beginning."

Then the narrator meets her again. Ungrounded as ever, now that her mom has died, she gets married. But her husband is a cold fish who plays head games.

She leaves him and returns to the old neighbourhood. Then she gets hooked on cocaine. She is still a vagabond at heart.
***

Several years back I watched a CBC Canada documentary about the Ottawa ‘Hidden Homeless.’ Those poor souls were caught up in an entropic sinkhole of near-poverty. Thank Heaven for our social safety nets here.

Louki and her confederates, though, have no meaningful safety net. They stumble blindly from meaningless, vacuous experiences into deeper meaninglessness.

Like the marginalized poor in that documentary, they rely only on their dumb luck. That and four bits won’t buy you even a coffee to warm up these days.

I now - quite frankly - find Modiano’s novel appalling. Yet this is kinda life is now widespread. And I’ve seen glimpses of it in my own life, alas.

That’s emptiness. But I, in Sartrean bad faith, have created countless fuller reviews. For my writing, though not empty of self, was empty of all true existential value.

And now I some nights yearn for my historicist self, “in windless (and inner) cold.”

My reviews, alas, have been in the first person: and reality is much more in the third person. As reality has treated poor, empty Louki.
***

Lost Youth is a flawed masterpiece. But it is only flawed in that it resorts to “the (comforting) crook of elbows and knees" instead of blunt action.

There is cold comfort in being lost, Modiano seems to say.

And, like me, he compounds his confusion, “in always answering a question with a question. A master of the feint and parry.”

His Roland, like Louki, is forever lost.

But like me and my false historicism, at least he is human.

And the book's intolerable ending is so Humanly, Heart-Wrenchingly Sad!

And so bitterly honest.

[Dolors · Rating 4 out of 5]

Set against the backdrop of the sixties in Paris, “In the Café of Lost Youth” explores the idea of a safe haven for those who wander through the “neutral zones” of a city where past, present a future are disquietingly interconnected.

Bohemians, undergraduates, writers and philosophers find common ground in the “Condé”, a café where the four narrators struggle to set straight their half-remembered lives while navigating the turbulent waves of an elusive present. But unlike Proust’s “recherche”, time and memory can’t be recaptured again, they disappear along with the list of names, set of addresses and Metro stations that try to give permanence to the passers-by that populate this story.

In the end, we are felt to aimlessly roam the meandering streets of Paris, maybe lingering in its transitional zones, in the no-man’s lands that border on everyting and merge with nothing and leave us suspended in limbo, not knowing exactly where that feeling of emptiness has come from but blinded with the radiant light of a fleeting moment of happiness, of lost youth, never regained.


P.S. – I read this novella in Catalan, hence, my original review:

L’escena és el París dels anys seixanta. “En el cafè de la joventut perduda” explora la idea d’un punt de trobada per aquells que deambulen les “zones neutrals” d’una ciutat on el passat, el present i el futur es donen la mà d’una manera inquietant.

Bohemis, universitaris, escriptors i filòsofs es troben al “Condé”, un cafè on quatre narradors intenten recordar les seves vides mentre naveguen a la deriva del seu present. Però a diferència de la “recerca” de Proust, el temps i la memoria són irrecuperables, ja que es dissolen juntament amb les llistes de noms, adreces i estacions de metro que intenten, futilment, donar un cert sentit de permanència als vagabunds existencials que habiten aquesta història.

Al final, el lector es troba caminant sense destí pels carrers de París, potser aturant-se en les zones de transició, les zones de ningú que es toquen amb tot sense fondre’s amb res i que et deixen en eterna suspensió, en el limbo, sense saber exactament d’on ve aquest buit que t’empapa l’ànima però encegat per la llum radiant d’un moment de felicitat fugaç, vist i no vist, un moment de joventut perduda, que mai més tornarà.

[Algernon · Rating 5 out of 5]

At the halfway point of the journey making up real life, we were surrounded by a gloomy melancholy, one expressed by so very many derisive and sorrowful words in the cafe of lost youth.

With this epigraph by Guy Debord I feel ready to dig into my first mystery novel by Patrick Modiano and discover what is so special about his stories to merit a Nobel Prize in literature...

The central mystery of this slim yet multi-layered novel is the eternal "cherchez la femme" – the quest to unlock the mystery of the beautiful stranger nicknamed Louki, a quiet young woman who used to come to a small cafe near the Place de l'Odeon in Paris.

She was taking refuge here, at the 'Conde', as if she were running from something, trying to escape some danger. This thought came to me upon seeing her alone, all the way at the back where no one would notice her.

Louki's portrait is sketched by four narrators, each of them in his or her own way a drifter through life who seeks refuge among the friendly and slightly decadent atmosphere of a bar at night. First there is a student at the nearby Sorbonne, then a private investigator hired by the woman's abandoned husband, followed by Louki herself and concluded by an artist companion.

I've always believed that certain places are like magnets and draw you towards them should you happen to walk within their radius. And this occurs imperceptibly, without you even suspecting. All it takes is a sloping street, a sunny sidewalk, or maybe a shady one. Or perhaps a downpour. And this leads you straight there, to the exact spot you're meant to wash up.

I fell under the spell of Modiano's prose right from the start – almost like coming home to my own version of Paris, constructed out of those black & white movies of Truffaut and Goddard from the 60's and fleshed out during day-long walks through the streets of the town as I returned year after year to this city that has become my favorite destination in Europe. I know all about magnets, and my favorites are not very far from the haunts of Louki and her friends : Boul. St Michel going to Jardin de Luxembourg and climbing the hill of Montmartre, from Pigalle to Place du Tertre. Modiano fills his pages with the name of these streets that may sound confusing to a stranger in the city, but are filled with history and romance for the true 'boulevardier'.

Step by step though, the author guided me from the tourist view to the disturbing, sad inner landscape of people living at the edge of society – misfits, bohemians, loners – a group of mostly young people who meet at the 'Conde' more to hide from the world than to plan to take it by storm.

In this life that sometimes seems to be a vast, ill-defined landscape without signposts, amid all of the vanishing lines and the lost horizons, we hope to find reference points, to draw up some sort of land registry so as to shake the impression that we are navigating by chance. So we forge ties, we try to find stability in chance encounters.

One of these ties Louki hopes will give her direction in life is marriage to a wealthy businessman. Yet, despite the showroom apartment in posh Neuilly and the attentions of her husband, Louki feels imprisoned by the bourgois lifestyle and runs away. ("Two photo-booth snapshots, one facing the camera, one in profile. And that's what we're supposed to forge links with?")

Louki's escapes started years before as a lonely child left to fend for herself by an unknown father and a mother working long evening hours at a cabaret in Pigalle. She started to walk the night streets alone as a teenager, got in trouble with the police and sought help from a friendly woman casually met on the street, ending in the circle of local drug smugglers from another small cafe.

It was without the slightest trace of lightheartedness that I returned to that apartment each night. I knew that sooner or later I would leave it for good. I was counting a great deal on the people I would eventually meet, which would put an end to my loneliness. This girl was my first encounter and perhaps she would help me take flight on my own.

Further attempts at flight from reality, from herself, from toxic friends and family ties define Louki's journey, illustrated by her favorite books ("Lost Horizon", "Louise, Sister of the Void"), her occasional drug use and her tentavive relationship with Roland, a young man she meets at a bookshop for esoteric material and the final narrator of her story.

Our having met, when I think about it now, seems like the meeting of two people who were completely without moorings in life. I think we were both alone in the world.

Roland, an aspiring poet and novelist, spends more time in bars and roaming the streets than working, yet he is atuned to the central theme of the novel, that of lost youth and of the places where it can be found buried.

Neutral zones have at least one advantage: They are only a starting point and we always leave them sooner or later.

Roland is also providing us with the epitaph for the Louki mystery :

She wanted to escape, to run farther and farther away, to break violently with her everyday life, to finally be able to breathe.

—«»—«»—«»—

As far as I am concerned, Patrick Modiano deserves all the praise and the awards that he gets : he is a master stylist who can combine mood and mystery into a compelling tale of human frailty. I plan to read more from his catalogue.

[Duane Parker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Paris in the 1950's. If I could choose a time travel destination, it might just be there and then. The War was history, the city was beautiful, and a Bohemian lifestyle existed in a cafe culture that I would have loved to experience.

That's the setting for this melancholic story by Modiano. The story of Louki, the enigmatic young woman who is emotionally and spiritually lost. She is constantly on the move through the streets and cafe's of Paris, seeking out others like herself.

This is my second novel by Patrick Modiano the Nobel laureate of 2014. He has written 30 novels, most of them only recently translated to English. There is something about his writing style, his themes and his characters, that strike the right note with me.

4 solid stars.

[Helga چـو ایـران نباشد تن من مـباد · Rating 4 out of 5]

That’s it. Just let yourself go.

Sometimes the heart aches at the very thought of things that might have been and never were.

A Café in Paris frequented by haphazard assortment of different individuals- bohemians-
and a mysterious woman dubbed Louki in the spotlight.

I’ve always believed that certain places are like magnets and draw you towards them should you happen to walk within their radius. And this occurs imperceptibly, without you even suspecting. All it takes is a sloping street, a sunny sidewalk, or maybe a shady one. Or perhaps a downpour. And this leads you straight there, to the exact spot you’re meant to wash up.

Where has Louki come from? What is her real name? Who is she, really? Why did she leave? Where has she gone?

No better way to make ghosts dissipate than to look them right in the eye.

Through the eyes of four narrators, four perspectives, four sides and four sketches, will we be able to know Louki better and understand her and make sense of her character and her being?
Would she let us?

I was never really myself when I wasn’t running away. My only happy memories are memories of flight and escape. But life always regained the upper hand.

As with Modiano’s other writings, the story revolves around passage of time, memories, identity, relinquishing the self and fading away.

Sometimes you remember certain episodes of your life and you need proof that you haven’t dreamed them.

[Jennifer nyc · Rating 4 out of 5]

I sat with my pile of books, trying to decide what to read next, and felt immediately drawn into this world. The writing invited me to wonder about a young woman, new to the Bohemian mix inside a mid-20th-century, Parisian café. We see her through multiple perspectives, creating both a sense of intimacy and mystery. Then we hear from her.

This is a novella - a slice of life in a moment in time. The writing is clean, accessible and stimulating.
In the end, I felt cheated, I wanted more. But, I think that's exactly what was meant to be, given what happens.

[Hugh · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is my second experience of Patrick Modiano - I read Dora Bruder a few years ago and to be honest didn't really enjoy it or quite get the point of it. It has been chosen as a group read this month by the 21st Century Literature group.

It is only a short book, and perhaps I made the mistake of reading it in several sessions over four days because other commitments meant my reading time was limited, so I feel I missed some of the resonances. It is quite an elusive story - what plot there is concerns a cafe in 1950s Paris called Le Condé popular with bohemian artists, and a mysterious young woman who the regulars there nickname Louki. Louki, whose real name is Jacqueline Delanque, is refracted through the accounts of four different narrators (one of them herself), none of whom create a whole picture. The strongest impression formed is the portrait of the city itself.

I did find this an enjoyable read, but I don't feel capable of reviewing it properly.

[Jacob S · Rating 5 out of 5]

This has been a very emotional trip to Paris, touching on so many levels.

I picture myself walking the streets of Paris.
My then girlfriend was studying and working near the Opera, and I had too much spare time.
It is morning, midday, afternoon, evening and night. At all hours I am exploring, new streets and new quarters, going by the Metro to the last station on the line, some times walking back.
I have seen all the characters who might have lost their youth, and those clinging hard to what´s left of it.
Stopping at a Tabac buying Le Parisien and exchanging the obligatory courtesies, sitting in Parc des Buttes-Chaumont watching life pass by. Taking in the facades of the buildings in the Quartier Tolbiac, almost expecting to bump into Nestor Burma when I turn the next corner.
At that time I felt I could easily disappear into Paris. I felt the pulse and went with the flow.
Stranger in a strange land we seek sympathy in faces that pass by and those that stop and step into our lives for a while.
To me, this is what the Cafe of My Lost Youth is about.
How we grow from young to mature and how the urge to belong one day meets with the feeling of integrity, and give birth to the knowledge that you belong wherever you want to.

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 5 out of 5]

In The Café of Lost Youth is maybe my fifth book by 2014 Nobel winner and Parisian Patrick Modiano, evoking a time in Paris in the fifties, a time of young people in cafes. Ostensibly, as with some others of his work, it is in part about a search for a mysterious woman, a waiflike Jacqueline Delangue, nicknamed Louki (and everyone in Café Conde at that time were given nicknames, in part to keep the air of mystery and secret identity some of them wanted to preserve). Someone in the Conde tried to keep track for a few years of all the people who came into the café, day and night, and one of the narrators has his hands on that record; it includes names, dates, times, which people sat where and when. But what do we need to recreate a time? Facts won’t do. Real identity, and the past itself, is shrouded in mystery.

“It’s about creating ties, you see. . . In this life that sometimes seems to be a vast, ill-defined landscape, amid all of the vanishing lines and lost horizons, we hope to find reference points, to draw up some kind of land registry so as to shake the impression that we are navigating by chance.”

This story is told from four different perspectives, with four different narrators,
including Louki herself, while Modiano explores the themes of identity, memory, and forgetting that are at the heart of his work: To try to reclaim the past though memory and exploration, always falling short of that hopeless goal of retrieval.

Modiano seems to be himself mainly writing from memory, but he was in part inspired to write this by his viewing/memory of the grainy black and white street photographs of youth by Ed van der Elsken. Here’s a NY Times article on him:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/ar...

Wait: This is even better for our purposes, a view of his Love on the Left Bank:

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddes...

In particular, Modiano was fascinated by van der Elsken’s photographs of the circle of Guy Debord, whom he renames Guy de Vere. Debord was a French Marxist thinker in Paris at that time, who taught classes/held meetings in various places around the city. Louki, who had said she was a college student but was really not, was impressed by de Vere, and attended some of his meetings, read some of his work and the work he suggested she read.

Louki’s mother died when she was young. The father is never part of the picture. She seems a vagabond, married 36-year-old Jean-Pierre at 22, left him soon after, who contacted a detective to try to find her. The PI tracks her down, but decides against telling the husband, though he might be speaking for Modiano as writer and searcher of mysteries:

“By what right do we intrude, forcing our way in like common crooks, and by what presumptuousness do we delve into their heads and into their hearts—and ask them to account for themselves? By what authority?”

And yet, Modiano has Louki narrate her own version of events in the section that follows: She says that Guy de Vere gave her Lost Horizons [see quote to read, a book about a group of people climbing the mountains of Tibet in search of the monastery Shang-ri-la, in hopes for discovering the meaning of life. Louki reads it, but says, “It’s not worth the trouble to go so far. For me, Montmartre was my Tibet.”

But she also reveals about herself: “I was never really myself when I wasn’t running away. My only memories were memories of flight and escape.” De Vere also gives her a copy of Louise, Sister of the Void, and Louki crosses out the name Louise and replaces it with her own real name, Jacqueline, on the cover of the book. This act would be prescient, as it turns out.

But Louki is just one of several people at the Conde. This is a café with a swirl of interesting, unknowable characters. He uses this scene to contemplate on knowability. For me, there have been certain special bars in my life; one was the Del Rio in Ann Arbor, where I spent hours with friend Tom. Gone except in memory, torn down. My first important one, also long ago torn down, was The White Rabbit in Grand Rapids, Michigan (okay, it’s not Paris, but stick with me here; like Louki says, it was my Conde), a place where pseudo-intellectuals and would-be poet-philosophers drank and wrote in notebooks in candlelit corners; it was a place for cultivating a sense of mystery. It’s also where I once held the (pool) table for three hours; where I saw a guy who lost a game sucker punch a guy in the kidneys, who went down like a sack of potatoes, cops called; where we stood and watched the Ali-Liston fights, PBRs in hand, where I drank flaming shots of something on my 25th birthday; where the filmmaker Paul Schrader came in one night, dressed in a white suit, with white bucks and a white cowboy hat and mirror sun glasses, asking “who wants to be in my movie [Hardcore]? A round for the bar!” It was a place for me of magic, with a great Dylan and Traffic jukebox, with blues and jazz mixed in with Joni Mitchell, where I talked Dostoevsky and wrote bad poems.

I love Modiano. He’s a beautiful writer. In this book there is mystery, with a touch of existentialist noir, and melancholy. I see once again people find he 1) writes the same book, over and over, like any mystery writer and 2) he is boring. His Goodreads average is very low, 3.48, but for me he is an old friend, who creates an aura I recall in The White Rabbit and the Del Rio. Hmm, maybe I’ll go out for drink and talk to some strangers at that little bar down the street, get to know them, at least a little. . .

"I've always believed that certain places are like magnets and draw you towards them should you happen to walk within their radius."

[Vicky "phenkos" · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is a sense of sadness as I begin to write my review of this book. Sadness because the book is about someone or something lost; the titular youth or the selves each of the four narrators has left behind. But also sadness because nothing is crystal clear, there is no certainty or redemption anywhere.

If you have read anything by Modiano, you’ll know that he is not a conventional writer and doesn’t stick to a single genre. Instead, his books comprise elements from many different genres: mystery, personal memoir, travelogue, and others. If you start a book of his expecting a straightforward mystery, though, you’ll be disappointed. There’s no plot here that finds its resolution in the last page. Similarly, if it’s a personal memoir you’re after, you’d better steer clear; here there’s no unequivocal ‘I’ that knows who he or she is and conveys events or reminiscences in a linear manner. If you’re to persevere with Modiano, you’ll have to let yourself be transported to another place and another time: a place that is nowhere to be found and a time that resembles the meanderings and non-sequiturs of dreams.

In this sense, Modiano reminds me of Cezanne who has been dubbed a ‘painter’s painter’ because his work opened new horizons in art even though it might itself be difficult or less expressive than we might like. Modiano would then be a ‘writer’s writer’; you read Modiano in order to shake loose the preconceptions of what a literary work should be like; it should have a clear plot, a set of fully developed characters whose motivations are (or become) clear to the reader. But what drives these characters of Modiano’s? What makes the private detective (narrator no. 2) want to keep Louki’s secret? it’s a mystery that is never resolved.

I enjoy being carried away by Modiano’s writing; reading his sentences is like listening to the splashing sound of the waves. But I also look for meaning, I have this compulsive and probably entirely childish desire for finality, for a truth that will be revealed at the end, a requirement which Modiano does not satisfy. This is not Modiano’s failing but mine; I’ll just have to make do with what few nuggets of meaning Modiano does provide.

[Denis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of things have been written about Modiano's "little music", and once again it is his little music (a certain way of writing, a unique way of creating a special atmosphere, etc) that holds this novel together and makes its undeniable charms. Not by any means Modiano's best book, it is nevertheless as delightful, dreamy, bitter-sweet, vaguely melancholy and extremely nostalgic, as most of his novels are. Nothing much happens, in this story about a mysterious young woman whose portrait emerges through the voices of different men, but, as usual with Modiano, what's important is what's untold and what the reader can sense in between the lines : a world of lost youth, murky pasts, shadows from years gone by, feelings once felt and now slowly fading, memories... Nobody depicts this elusive, "in between" world better than Modiano. He may do that in each of his books, and some people may find him repetitive and boring, but he does it with such style, elegance, and emotion, that it's truly hard to resist. This short novel is elegiac and deceptively simple - it's like a sad, little refrain coming from far away, that you keep humming, and can't remember where or when you heard it first.

[benedicta · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75⭐️ I don't get it, why three povs if the story only follows one character's life details? 🤔🤔

[Kiran Dellimore · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the Café of Lost Youth is a sad, tragic story about a young mysterious woman, known to many as Louki, living in Paris, struggling to find her way in life. Patrick Modiano masterfully tells the tale from her perspective, as well as those of different people who have been acquainted with her at varying levels of intimacy, who each peel back layer after layer of the enigma surrounding her existence. Ultimately Modiano paints a disturbing portrait of Louki's 'rudderless' life, from a troubled youth, to a loveless marriage and being caught in the snare of drug abuse. The Bohemian quarters of Paris feature vividly in the narrative, making the city appear as a persistent character weaving through the story. The short length of In the Café of Lost Youth belies its heavy emotional weight. This is to say the least not a light summer afternoon read.

**Disclaimer**: I read In the Café of Lost Youth in English, but I would be curious to reread it in French. It would not surprise me if Modiano's writing would be even more compelling in his native tongue.

[Connie G · Rating 4 out of 5]

"There were two entrances to the Cafe, but she always opted for the narrower one hidden in the shadows. She always chose the same table at the back of the little room."

The Cafe Conde's patrons were a group of Bohemian writers and intellectuals in 1950s Paris. A mysterious young woman, who they nickname Louki, sometimes sits with them but doesn't usually participate in the conversations.

The book has multiple narrators showing us various aspects of Louki's life. Louki's teenage years had been lonely with an absent father and a mother who worked nights, so Louki wandered the streets at night. She had recently left her husband, and became involved with Roland, an aspiring writer.

While the book follows the elusive Louki, it also explores space and time. One of the ideas is that in the confusion of a large city, everyone needs to find a few "fixed points" to hold on to, such as a favorite cafe. Another idea was that there were "neutral zones . . . a series of transitional zones -- no-man's-lands where we were on the border of everything else, in transit, or even held suspended."

Louki and others were often wandering the streets of Paris. Neighborhoods changed, and locations appeared and disappeared. Much was still a dreamy mystery by the end, but it was a lovely journey. 3.5 stars, rounded up.

[Andy · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was the first book I've read by Patrick Modiano, the well-known contemporary French novelist, and I have to say it was disappointing.

I was initially attracted to it by the title, a reference drawn from 60's radical and Situationist theorist Guy Debord's "anti-memoirs."

Loosely, the story revolves around a mysterious young Bohemian woman, Louki, described from several points of view: a young student who frequents the same café; a private-eye hired by her much-older husband to find her; Roland, her friend and possible lover; and Louki herself.

Individual moments are compelling, but the whole is rather banal. The characters are mostly forgettable, most damningly so Louki herself. There are interesting moments, particularly the first section narrated by the young student describing life in the café all the characters habit, but it devolves after the opening chapter into a rather random and clichéd story of male obsession with a troubled, beautiful young woman, invariably ending in her self-destruction. Mix in some occultists and Roland's pseudo-Lettrist philosophy, and that is, as they say, about it.

[Stela · Rating 4 out of 5]

Les points fixes des zones neutres

Qu’est-ce que l’éternel retour ? Pour Nietzsche, c’est une allégorie aux connotations morales, un choix hypothétique que la mort nous offrirait entre le néant et la répétition perpétuelle et détaillée de notre vie. Pour le hindouisme, c’est la description du destin humain, le piège des avatars, c’est-à-dire des renaissances successives. Pour Mircea Eliade, c’est la dialectique du sacré par rapport au profane : la répétition infinie des gestes archétypales afin de les maintenir vivants dans la mémoire collective.

Pour les héros du roman au titre proustien de Patrick Modiano, c’est un peu de tout cela, un effort de reconstituer le passé, en redessinant ses zones neutres que la mémoire a ombragées et qu’ils tentent d’éclairer à l’aide de quelques repères fragiles dans le temps, espace, noms et émotions.

Nous étions là, ensemble, à la même place, de toute éternité, et notre promenade à travers Auteuil, nous l’avions déjà faite au cours de mille et mille autres vies.

La caractéristique commune de ces quatre « points fixes » est, paradoxalement, l’ambiguïté. Non seulement le temps des événements est imprécis (échappé à la contrainte historique et mesuré seulement en durée toute pure, pour employer un terme bergsonien), mais la géographie parisienne est également vague, les noms cachent la vraie identité car ils sont choisis, non portés et les émotions changent continuellement la perspective.

Les quatre narrateurs, en faisant semblant de se charger de la désambiguïsation de ces repères, ne font que les obscurcir. Le premier, un élève à L’École des mines, joue le rôle du narrateur témoin, très peu impliqué dans le déroulement des événements, qui lui ont laissé quelque souvenir nostalgique d’une femme mystérieuse, dont il connaît seulement le surnom avec lequel elle a été baptisée un jour dans le café Le Condé qu’il fréquentait dans sa jeunesse. Pour lui, Louki représente l’éternel féminin, l’amour idéal et ineffable, et la visite dans le passé n’a pas le but de compléter les pages restées blanches du cahier de Bowing (celui qui, obsédé par les points fixes, consignait dedans tous les clients du café), mais de chérir les souvenirs imprécis de sa jeunesse.

Le deuxième narrateur, le détective Pierre Caisley, est la voix froide de la réalité, le narrateur omniscient, qui nous fournit le vrai nom de Louki, ainsi que des informations sur son passé. Il semble déchirer impitoyablement le voile de mystère, en rendant Louki ordinaire, mais à la fin lui aussi, ensorcelé, lui permet de s'échapper du con de la lumière cruelle où il l'avait capturée.

Quant à Louki, le narrateur héros, elle ne fait que nous offrir quelques détails de son enfance, peut-être pour justifier son besoin perpétuel d’évasion (« Je n’étais vraiment moi-même qu’à l’instant où je m’enfuyais. Mes seuls bons souvenirs sont des souvenirs de fuite ou de fugue. ») et à la fin de sa courte histoire elle se rebaptise d'un nom qui semble illustrer sans équivoque son choix dans le dilemme nietzschéen :

Un jour de cafard, sur la couverture du livre que Guy de Vere m’avait prêté : Louise du Néant, j’ai remplacé au stylo bille le prénom par le mien. Jacqueline du Néant.

Enfin, c’est Roland, le narrateur au nom d’emprunt et au rôle complexe réunissant à peu près les rôles joués par tous les autres narrateurs, qui recueille les fils narratifs et porte l’histoire à sa fin, sans la dérober de sa marge de mystère. C’est Roland qui nous aide à dessiner la carte de Paris, le Paris des rêves et des espoirs, des zones neutres où se perdent les pas des amants et les visages des gens rencontrés par hasard, le Paris des Champs Elysées où les Orphée tournent en vain la tête après leur Eurydice qui habite les limbes:

Je préfère remonter à pied les Champs-Élysées un soir de printemps. Ils n’existent plus vraiment aujourd’hui, mais, la nuit, ils font encore illusion. Peut-être sur les Champs-Élysées entendrai-je ta voix m’appeler par mon prénom…

Mythique Paris de leur jeunesse. Jeunesse qui s'appelle Louki, évidemment, silhouette élusive et changeante selon les perceptions de chacun, pour symboliser soit un idéal, l'éternel féminin comme pour l’élève à l'École des mines, soit un mystère à être gardé révérencieusement, comme pour le détective, soit l’Amour, comme pour Roland. La jeunesse, seule partie de la vie qui nous pourrait convaincre à choisir l’éternel retour, mais qui, elle, malheureusement, choisit toujours le néant.

[Deea · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book without knowing anything about its subject, its form or anything. I just liked the title and decided to read it. It's a very interesting exercise of literature and the style is totally enticing: while reading it I had the feeling that I was in a boat on a really quiet sea, being carried by the lullaby of the waves. It was a strange sensation and it continued up to the very end.

I don't want to write anything about the subject of the book itself as I think any prior information you might have before reading this book will definitely break the spell that the charm of its lines casts on the reader.

[Maria Bikaki · Rating 4 out of 5]

Άραγε, είμαστε πραγματικά υπεύθυνοι για τους κομπάρσους που δεν τους έχουμε επιλέξει και τους συναντάμε στο ξεκίνημα της ζωής μας;.........

Ήταν εκεί ο πανικός, πότε πότε, στην προοπτική ότι οι κομπάρσοι που έχεις αφήσει πίσω σου, μπορούν να σε ξαναβρούν και να σου ζητήσουν λογαριασμό. Πρέπει να κρυφτείς για να ξεφύγεις απ'αυτούς τους εκβιαστές, ελπίζοντας ότι, μία μέρα, θα βρεθείς οριστικά έξω απ'την εμβέλειά τους. Εκεί ψηλά, στον αέρα της κορυφής. Ή στον αέρα της ανοιχτωσιάς"

Η πρώτη μου επαφή με τον Μοντιάνο ήταν με τη βίλα της θλίψης. Δεν είχα ενθουσιαστεί τότε θυμάμαι όμως είχα υποσχεθεί στον εαυτό μου ότι θα επιστρέψω κάποια στιγμή γιατί κάτι μου έλεγε ότι είχα να πάρω κάτι καλύτερο από το συγκεκριμένο συγγραφέα. Τούτο δω το βιβλίο, το περιτριγυρίζω για να το διαβάσω τουλάχιστον κανά χρόνο και όλο έλεγα άσε δεν είναι ακόμα η ώρα του. Ε να που έφτασε. Είναι από κείνες τις φορές που σιχτιρίζω το goodreads που δεν μας δίνει τη δυνατότητα του μισού αστεριού γιατί ήθελα να βάλω ακριβώς 3,5 αστεράκια. Ούτε 3 ούτε 4. Τελοσπάντων, θα πάει αυτή τη φορά υπέρ του συγγραφέως. Μου άρεσε πολύ αυτή η δεύτερη επαφή με τον Μοντιάνο. Ένα πραγματικά νοσταλγικό αναγνωστικό ταξίδι στο παρελθόν, μια αποθέωση του Παρισιού. Μυρωδιές, εικόνες μιας άλλης εποχής.
Μέσα στο περίφημο καφέ άνθρωποι προβληματίζονται, ψάχνουν μαζί ν ανακαλύψουν τις όμορφες πλευρές της ζωής, ψυχαναλύονται και στη μέση μια νεαρή θαμώνας που ξαφνικά εξαφανίζεται με τους υπόλοιπους ήρωες να καταγράφουν τα γεγονότα σύμφωνα με τη δική τους εκδοχή. Μοναξιά, όνειρα, προσδοκίες ξετυλίγονται με φόντο το νοσταλγικό Παρίσι. Μου άρεσε πολύ. Η απουσία ουσιαστικής πλοκής πάντως σίγουρα θα το κάνει βαρετό και όχι ιδιαίτερα ελκυστικό σε αρκετά μεγάλη μερίδα αναγνωστών.

[Elina · Rating 2 out of 5]

Δυστυχώς η γλυκόπικρη αυτή ιστορία δεν με άγγιξε καθόλου. Μάλλον με έκανε να βαρεθώ κιόλας. Δεν ένιωσα να με παρασύρουν συναισθήματα γιατί δεν ξύπνησε μέσα μου κανένα συναίσθημα. Όλο αυτό που διάβασα μου φάνηκε ψυχρό και αποστασιοποιημένο. Ίσως και λίγο ψεύτικο. Τί να κάνουμε...γούστα είναι αυτά.

[Nercs · Rating 3 out of 5]

یکی از بزرگترین آرزوی اهالی کتاب، اینه که بتونن همه زبانهای دنیا رو یاد بگیرن که ادبیات هر کشوری رو به همون زبان اصلی‌ش بخونن. واسه کسی که توی این وادی‌ها نیست، آرزوی مسخره‌ای بنظر میرسه؛ ولی واقعاً با هر کتاب بیشتر بهم ثابت میشه که چقدر هدفم خوب و منطقیه.
مثلاً همین پاتریک مودیانو. این آقا تو زبان مادری‌ش اصلاً هم احمق و بی‌استعداد بنظر نمیرسه. شخصیت‌های بسیار قوی، منحصر به فرد و پخته‌ای میسازه و نوبل ادبیات رو هم می‌بره. بعد شما فکر کن دو تا مترجم بی‌استعداد میان جوری گند میزنن به مرد بیچاره که تمام زندگی حرفه‌ایش رو می‌برن زیر سوال. نکنید. چون صرفاً زبان بلدید دلیل نمیشه مترجم باشید.

[Théo d'Or]

I've read countless favorable reviews about Modiano, but I don't realize how it has always escaped me.
But not last week, when, anxiously searching for a classic, to make me forget about this damn pandemic, I found this volume, and I didn't miss the opportunity again. I had some reluctance, though, I always have it, when it comes to an author I don't have many references to.
But, after all, why not ?
"In the Cafè of Lost Youth " - brings together fragments that belong to several voices.
We are dealing with 4 narrators, who reconstruct the story of Jacqueline Delanque, known as " Louki ", in the circle of artists with whom she spent her time. The third narrator is Louki herself, who tells us that her big drama comes precisely from the fact that she never had anyone close to her. Nothing special, you could think, that's a normal drama, if we could say so....
Louki reveals his sufferings without any trace of pathos, all her night escapes having a single purpose : that of not being alone in the darkness that dominated the room in which she lived.
Modiano manages to give birth in this novel to a heroine with a special title, however, a woman who cannot be understood, just because she is constantly fleeing from herself, and from others too.
And all this, precisely despite her efforts to find herself.. Quite paradoxal, in a way... A street, a book, a Café - all are pretexts that Louki uses in her struggle with life, with the meaning or with its lack, even.
Her final solution only intrigues me even more, and makes me wonder if there is anything else in life, besides deserted streets, and cafés where we feel very close to some strangers...The theme of extinction comes here only in response to a self-flight, the permanent flight of the one who hides from himself. Not even the esoteric sciences can't get rid of you yourself, especially since they promote the eternal return.
All this rush of the Self to the world, and then against it, of the Self to the unrealizable desire, of the tragedy of awareness of the human condition, have a charm which only life has, and which Modiano captures in an absolutely authentic prose.
A book and a recommendable author, even if he failed to make me forget this damn pandemic.. Maybe still a classic would have succeeded, I don't know.

[Marc Lamot · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title of this book, with a reference to a 'lost youth', immediately arouses a sense of melancholy that is the trademark of Modiano. This is the fourth book that I read of him, and I can quite understand that people say that he always writes the same book: about people who look back on their past, automatically generating a certain nostalgia. But they do this invariably out of a sense of deprivation, a deficit in the present that they are trying to fill with that past. In vain of course. Moreover, the always precise geographical indications in the story, invariably in the (wide) Paris area, arouse an impression of concreteness, but nothing is less true: the story lines fathom an indeterminacy and vagueness, which in turn strengthens the melancholic effect.

In this book a special woman is put in the center, a certain Jacqueline, also called Louki, who is constantly on the run as soon as she settles somewhere. Four men who have known her, most of them as a visitor to the cafe in the Latin quarter that she also frequented for a while, are trying to track her down. That's because in one way or another she managed to leave a lasting impression upon them. But Jacqueline is a deeply tragic character, failing to connect with other people.

In short, this is another modest gem by Modiano, if only by his very recognizable, smooth style. Only the episode in which Jacqueline herself is talking to us, seemed to me to be a construction error, because this episode adds little to what we already knew through the other characters.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Καθημερινά πρόσωπα που κάτι αναζητούν... κάποιοι αλλάζουν στόχο στην πορεία, κάποιοι τα καταφέρνουν, άλλοι όχι... Η μελαγχολία της διαρκούς αναζήτησης, με φόντο κρυμμένα δρομάκια και μεγάλες λεωφόρους, διαδρομές μετρό και τρένων, η παρέα στο στέκι ενός εναλλακτικού καφέ είναι τα κυρίαρχα μοτίβα. Εκπληκτική ατμόσφαιρα, εστιάζει στον άνθρωπο με φόντο την πόλη. Προσωπική μου αδυναμία αυτή η περιπλάνηση, μείον ένα αστεράκι από τα 5 γιατί δεν δέθηκα ιδιαίτερα... Έχω ήδη παραγγείλει και άλλα βιβλία του συγγραφέα.

[David Carrasco · Rating 5 out of 5]

A veces me pregunto por qué recordamos ciertos lugares como si fueran personas. Un café viejo, una esquina anodina, una calle cualquiera. Hay rincones que se quedan pegados a la memoria con más fuerza que muchos rostros. Quizá por eso, cuando empecé En el café de la juventud perdida, sentí esa punzada familiar: la sensación de volver a un sitio donde nunca he estado y que, sin embargo, parece esperarme desde hace años.

Modiano nos coloca en una París tamizada por el tiempo, esa ciudad que no es exactamente real, pero que todos hemos habitado alguna vez en la imaginación. En el café Le Condé se reúnen los que buscan algo sin saber qué —poetas en barbecho, estudiantes sin brújula, habituales del insomnio, espíritus inquietos— y entre ellos aparece Louki, esa muchacha que entra en un lugar como si viniera huyendo de otro. La novela gira en torno a ella, pero no en el sentido clásico: Louki no es un misterio que se resuelva, sino una presencia que te obliga a mirar tus propias grietas.

La estructura es uno de los mayores aciertos del libro. Cuatro narradores intentan contarnos quién fue Louki, y ninguno lo consigue del todo. Cada voz ilumina una esquina distinta de su vida, y al final tienes la sensación de que Modiano ha hecho lo contrario de lo que sugiere: no nos da a Louki, nos da nuestras propias preguntas. Como cuando un recuerdo te roza y no sabes si es tuyo o lo heredaste sin querer. Y aunque la novela parezca, en un principio, una evocación nostálgica de una época, pronto se revela como un juego de pistas y omisiones donde lo importante es lo que no se dice.

Pero lo más fascinante es cómo, a través de esas voces, Louki se convierte en el negativo fotográfico de todas las vidas que la rodean. Cada narrador revela más de sí mismo que de ella. Esta idea siempre me recuerda a Natalia Ginzburg, que sabía hablar de ausencias como si fueran personajes principales. O incluso a la Madame Bovary de Flaubert, pero en clave tenue, sin tragedia, solo con melancolía.

Y luego está la prosa de Modiano. Su aparente sencillez es una trampa deliciosa: frases limpias, casi tímidas, que esconden una profundidad que llega sin avisar. Nunca subraya nada; solo va dejando pequeñas señales en el margen, como migas de pan en un bosque que no siempre te llevan al mismo sitio. Y cuando quiere, una sola línea te desbarata: “Para mí, el Condé era un refugio de toda la monotonía que anticipaba en la vida. Un día habrá una parte de mí —la mejor parte— que tendré que dejar atrás allí.”

Louki —su hambre de pertenecer, su necesidad de escapar, esa fragilidad que no se confiesa pero se intuye— encarna algo que todos hemos sentido alguna vez: la sospecha de estar viviendo una vida que no acaba de ser la nuestra. Y al mismo tiempo, la esperanza de que un lugar —un café, una persona, una conversación nocturna— pueda rescatarnos por un instante de nosotros mismos.

Lo que hace que En el café de la juventud perdida sea profundamente conmovedora es cómo Modiano transforma lo cotidiano en algo universal: las dudas, las decisiones sin aparente trascendencia, las conexiones fugaces que nos moldean sin que lo sepamos. El lector no solo acompaña a los narradores en su búsqueda de Louki; también se encuentra con su propia fragilidad, su añoranza y esa sensación de haber dejado atrás algo indefinible. Como si el café Le Condé no fuese un lugar físico, sino una metáfora del deseo humano de detenerse en un instante perfecto.

Porque Modiano parece decirnos que lo esencial no es entender a Louki, sino aceptar que ciertas vidas —incluso la nuestra— están hechas de huecos, silencios y decisiones que no siempre recordamos haber tomado. Y que la memoria, caprichosa como es, convierte esos huecos en los lugares adonde más regresamos.

En el café de la juventud perdida no se lee para descubrir algo, sino para recordar algo que ya sabíamos sin haberlo pensado nunca: que todos, en algún momento, hemos sido esa figura que entra al café buscando un sitio donde sentarse… o donde desaparecer.

[Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had sat down at the counter. I had taken a postcard and started to write. "Just wait a little bit longer. I think things will be better." I had lit a cigarette and stuck a stamp on the card. But who to send it to?

This is my first experience of Modiano and I am grateful to the 21st Century Literature group for choosing it for the February 2018 group read because I doubt I would have picked it up otherwise. It is very short, but it probably needs at least 2 readings to get to grips with it.

There are four narrators (a student in a cafe, a private detective hired by a husband, the main protagonist herself and one of her lovers) and they take a section each in such a way that the whole novel builds a picture of Jacqueline Delanque (aka Louki). Building you own picture of Louki is perhaps one of the key elements of the story so I won’t include any details here. But Eternal Recurrence is a repeating phrase and several sci-fi books put in multiple appearances.

The writing is curiously detached. At one point, I was bizarrely reminded of Winnie-the-Pooh when Piglet says he can take part in a Woozle hunt because he has nothing to do until Friday. All the people in this novel seem to be drifting:

It was too late to catch the last metro. Just past the cafe was a hotel with the door open. A bare bulb lit a very steep staircase with black wooden steps. The nightwatchman didn’t even ask our names. He simply told us the number of a bedroom on the first floor. "Perhaps we could live here from now on," I said to Louki

And the quote at the start of my review seemed to sum up to mood of the book.

The other key character in the book is the city of Paris. A knowledge of the geography of Paris might add to the experience of the book. The company I used to work for had its head office on the outskirts of the city so I made fairly frequent trips there with visits to the city centre for dinner etc.. This meant I recognised some of the name of places, but I get the feeling that a proper knowledge of Paris would enhance the mood of the book. However, even without that knowledge, the writing style, which is very minimalist, along with the indirect discovery of a lot of the story, makes for a very atmospheric read. This is the Paris of late-night metro rides, of all night cafes, of night time walks along boulevards.

I think my plan is to let this marinade for a few days and then come back and read it again. There are references back and forward, so having an awareness of the way things develop will, I think, make this a fascinating book to look at again.

[Tuấn Lalarme · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tôi đã không muốn đọc quyển sách này, vì tôi cảm giác, nó sẽ rất gần với mình, nó sẽ là lời thủ thỉ về một Paris nào đó đã qua của tác giả với những số phận trôi dạt trong tuổi trẻ của mình, những số phận bất an, buồn, bối rối và lạc lõng. Tôi không muốn đọc nó vì tôi nghĩ tôi sẽ tìm thấy tôi trong đó, tôi của những năm tháng mà Paris giống như một trốn để tôi trốn vào tìm cho mình ý nghĩa của chuyến hành trình của đời mình.

Nhưng rồi cũng đọc, có lẽ cũng với cùng 1 lý do mà tôi không muốn đọc nó. Tôi muốn đọc khi tôi sắp rời Pháp, sắp sẽ chẳng biết bao giờ mới quay về Paris nữa, tôi muốn tìm thấy những tên đường, những cửa hiệu mà biết đâu tôi vẫn còn nhớ trong kí ức mình, tôi muốn được chiêm ngưỡng Paris qua một người sống ở đó, như tôi muốn chiêm ngưỡng chính mình, qua những kí ức vụn vặt của một thời xa xôi.

Quyển sách buồn, nó có kiểu u buồn rất Pháp mà những ai sống ở đây sẽ hiểu được, những ai chìm đắm trong sự rộng lớn của Paris để cho bản thân trôi theo dòng chảy của con người, của cuộc sống thường nhật sẽ hiểu được. Nó buồn, và nó đẹp, nó mang sự lịch thiệp, nhưng lại đầy vẻ tiếc nuối. Nó vừa có thật vừa không thật, những nhân vật đó, chặng đường cuối của họ, mang dáng vẻ tội nghiệp và đẩy đưa theo sự an bài của số phận.

Hôm tôi bảo bạn tôi, đọc quyển này thấy gần gũi quá, không chỉ vì bản thân tôi cũng trói mình vào nỗi buồn để tìm ra vẻ đẹp vĩnh cửa của nó, một sự quy hồi vĩnh cửu, khi rút cuộc mọi thứ trên cuộc đời đều sẽ quay về với nỗi buồn để ôm ấp cho đến chết. Tôi đọc mà như trôi đi trên trang sách, tôi đi trong hành trình vô định của nhân vật, trôi đi để chẳng đọng lại gì, chẳng nhớ được câu chuyện gì ngoài những điểm chính trên chặng đường của họ. Như thể, chính tôi, vào một buổi chiều buồn tháng 10, tôi lên Paris để mình lang thang khắp nơi, xong đến cuối cùng, tôi ngồi trong quán Cafe De Flore và nhận ra rằng, tôi đã không biết mình đã đi đâu, đang ở đâu, làm gì, với chính tuổi trẻ của mình.

Không giàu có,nhưng tinh tế, không dày, nhưng hiệu quả, không mang một câu chuyện có sức nặng, nhưng chất chứa vẻ đẹp đơn giản của cuộc đời. Một quyển sách nên đọc, khi ta đã có nhiều trải nghiệm trong đời.