In the Café of Lost Youth (New York Review Books Classics)

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I enjoy being carried away by Modiano’s writing; reading his sentences is like listening to the splashing sound of the waves. We know who most of them are because one of their number, Bowing, kept a record of who came and went, though not always with names.

I've read countless favorable reviews about Modiano, but I don't realize how it has always escaped me. The title of this book, with a reference to a 'lost youth', immediately arouses a sense of melancholy that is the trademark of Modiano.As with many of his books it is about identity, memory, time, forgetting and escaping—and 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.

Virtually all the people in this book seem to have a precarious existence, as is normal for a Modiano novel. Anecdote by anecdote, a more nuanced portrait of the woman emerges, and it’s made even more intriguing by hints that she’s been gone for a long time, missed by those who once knew her.Four narrators, a student from a café, a private detective hired by an aggrieved husband, the heroine herself and one of her lovers, construct a portrait of Jacqueline Delanque, otherwise known as Louki. 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. 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. 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. You may not fully engage with the human characters of In the Café of Lost Youth, but TripFiction fans will love the book’s insight into Paris.

The novel, inspired in part by the circle (depicted in the photographs of Ed van der Elsken) of the notorious and charismatic Guy Debord, centers on the enigmatic, waiflike figure of Louki, who catches everyone’s attention even as she eludes possession or comprehension.For Modiano, memory, experience are fluid, fleeting, and even the stories we tell ourselves are subject to change.