This short novel by Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano is a beautiful reverie about memory, melancholy and regret. A documentary movie maker, tired of his life of traipsing around the world after adventure and exotic cultures and locales, wonders what it's all been about, and begins to dwell upon a chance encounter he'd had many years ago with a couple 20 years his senior when he learns, by random chance, of the woman's suicide. His recreation of the couple's lives and his meditations about his own are woven together seamlessly to produce a vivid waking dream of a narrative. ( )

NARRATIVA

This is good literature. I know because it has won a prize, it is has a ghost of a storyline, and it is painfully boring. Sometimes I like or love good literature, and sometimes I don't understand. I don't understand why it's good, and even when it's explained to me, I don't understand why it is consumed.

A documentary filmmaker in Paris, Jean, abandons his unfaithful wife and disappears. Except he remains in Paris and pursues a thread of memory involving a couple that once took him in years earlier. He sneaks into his home during a celebration, witnesses his wife in a tryst with a second colleague of his, then sneaks back out. He flirts with returning home, but rents an apartment where the couple of his memory once lived. He's still living in Paris apart from his former life and the end of the story. ( )

I temi e la struttura sono quelli di sempre nei libri di Modiano. Memoria, ricerca del passato, ferite inguaribili delle guerra, solitudine della voce narrante in malinconico vagabondaggio per le strade di Parigi. Nonostante l’apparente monotonia tematica non riesco a staccarmi da questo autore (qui peraltro non alla sua prova migliore) che esercita su di me un’evidente fascinazione. E’ un fenomeno che mi è capitato molto di rado, certamente con Sebald e con pochissimi altri. In entrambi , pur trattandosi di scrittori che più diversi non potrebbero essere, riscontro la stupefacente capacità di rendere un sentire che mi appartiene in toto, di dare voce al malessere di una generazione che dalla guerra è stata solo sfiorata, ma sulla quale l’ombra lunga di ciò che è stato continua a persistere e non smette di accompagnarci. ( )