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Missing Person, by Patrick Modiano
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In this strange, elegant novel, Patrick Modiano portrays a man in pursuit of the identity he lost in the murky days of the Paris Occupation, the black hole of French memory.
For 10 years Guy Roland has lived without a past. His current life and name were given to him by his recently retired boss, Hutte, who welcomed him, a one-time client, into his detective agency. Guy makes full use of Hutte's files - directories, yearbooks, and papers of all kinds going back half a century - but leads to his former life are few. Could he really be that person in a photograph, a young man remembered by some as a South American attache? Or was he someone else, perhaps the disappeared scion of a prominent local family? He interviews strangers and is tantalized by half clues until, at last, he grasps a thread that leads him through a maze of his own repressed experience.
On one level, Missing Person is a detective thriller, a 1950s film noir mix of smoky cafes, illegal passports, and insubstantial figures crossing bridges in the fog. On another level, it is also a haunting meditation on the nature of the self. Modiano's spare, hypnotic prose, superbly translated by Daniel Weissbort, draws listeners into the intoxication of a rare literary experience.
- Sales Rank: #74036 in Audible
- Published on: 2015-11-02
- Format: Unabridged
- Original language: English
- Running time: 283 minutes
Most helpful customer reviews
83 of 85 people found the following review helpful.
The Work of a Master Storyteller
By Claude Forthomme (Nougat)
I read this book on my Kindle in the French version (French is my mother tongue) as I bought it for my 100 year old mother who still reads one novel a week on her Kindle. She wanted to read this book as soon as she heard he had won the Nobel, this is a book that came out in 1978, the year Patrick Modiano won the Goncourt, a prestigious French prize. Before bringing it over to her, I read it, immediately taken in by the opening lines, unable to put it down. As I am now writing this critique, I just learned from an article in the Washington Post, that "Missing Person" is the book Peter Englund, a historian and the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, recommends to readers unfamiliar with Patrick Modiano. “It’s a fun book,” Englund said. “He’s playing with the genre.” And the genre he is playing with is mysteries. A detective, suffering from amnesia, sets out to recover his identity, following a variety of strange leads.
I'd like to recall here a very astute comment made sometime back by Anne Korkokeakivi, writing for THE MILLIONS, where she noted that French novels tend to be "... dark, searching, philosophical, autobiographical, self-reflective, and/or poetic (without being overwritten)."
Patrick Modiano's "Missing Person" precisely fits this description. It is all these things, dark, searching, self-reflective and yes, poetic.
Consider the first lines: "I am nothing. Nothing but a pale shape, silhouetted that evening against the café terrace, waiting for the rain to stop; the shower had started when Hutte left me."
Amazing, isn't it? The opening sentence is just three words, but how they resound. I am nothing. That is of course the whole theme of the book. What comes next is a poetic evocation of someone barely there, uncertainly watching the rain. And the last part of the sentence immediately makes you want to know who is this Hutte - someone with a strange name if there ever was one.
Yes, that is how a master storyteller starts a novel, and I guarantee that you will be turning the pages as fast as I did. And you will be wondering as the main character follows clues that turn out to be non-clues, and you will find yourself perplexed as he attempts to start conversations with people who take him for...who? Really him or someone else? This is done very subtly, especially at the level of dialogues, the kind one carries on with people one barely knows. But can one ever really know the other and oneself? So yes, the book is presented as a mystery, but the mystery is the main character...And bottom line, our own selves, each and everyone of us, how sure are you of who you really are...
So how good is Patrick Modiano? Very good, five stars, I highly recommend it. And I think you'll be happily surprised what a short read it is too, featherweight, a little over 200 pages. A small perfection...
91 of 101 people found the following review helpful.
Beyond "Waiting for Godot". Or too numbed.
By Ronald Haak
"MISSING PERSON is on my short list of the very finest fiction since 1945. It's magnificent because of its vagueness. It's essential that the protagonist wander around in a daze to convey a Europe bereft of reference points, orientation and a sense of confident purpose.
"Mistah Kurz, he dead!" Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
"The empires of our time were shortlived, but they have altered the world forever. Their passing away is their least significant feature." Naipaul.
Heaped upon this lost purpose is the contribution of a subsequent interventionist: "If we fail, we will drag half the world down with us into the same abyss." Hitler.
MISSING PERSON illuminates European consciousness numbed and stupified by the fallout and consequences of these 3 historical developments.
This novel is a masterpiece.
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
Secrets of a Past
By Roger Brunyate
"I am nothing"* -- the opening phrase of this 1978 novel which won the Prix Goncourt for Patrick Modiano, now the most recent winner of the Nobel Prize. The protagonist is a private detective named Guy Roland. Only this is merely the name given to him by Hutte, his former employer at the detective agency when he rescued him from total amnesia a dozen years before, and gave him a job. Now Hutte is retiring to Nice, leaving Guy with only one case to investigate: his own.
Yes, it is a totally implausible concept, but Modiano is less interested in the mechanism of Guy's search for self than in what that search will reveal. The detective will follow a number of clues, each time finding somebody who will give him a tiny part of his story, but not the whole of it. The story is implausible too in that Guy gets almost none of the "Why bother me?" kinds of reaction that one might expect. Almost all his informants seem glad to talk with him; they invite him to their homes and give him boxes of souvenirs to go away with. This, even as Guy himself is having to pose as someone else to gain their confidence, trying on one possible role after another, as he gradually works out who he must be. And, as he does so, he begins to have flashes of memory of his own.
Artificial though the mechanism may be, there is none of the surrealism that one associates with many mid-century French writers. Modiano copies the "policier" style perfectly; his noir settings and vivid dialogue could come from the pen of Simenon or any of his followers. "The lights in the bar dimmed, as they do in some dance-halls at the beginning of a slow fox."* There is a fascination with his journeys into various quarters of Paris to meet new informants: a cocktail pianist, a jockey, various Russian expatriates, others of mixed or uncertain nationality. Although the original French title, "Rue des Boutiques Obscures" ("Street of Shady Shops" perhaps?) turns out to have little to do with Paris, the roman-noir idea of secrets hiding behind closed doors is a powerful and compelling one. This is an easy book to read, and I soon found myself swept up in its momentum. Here is a longer example that captures both theme and atmosphere well:
"In the lobbies of apartment buildings, I believe that you can still hear echoes of the footsteps of those who once crossed them but have now disappeared. Something continues to vibrate after their passing, sound waves getting weaker and weaker, but which you can still catch if you try. When it comes down to it, it may be that I never was this Pedro McEvoy, I never was anything; but the waves that passed by me, sometimes distant and sometimes closer, and all those echoes that hung in the air crystallized and that was me."*
It is writing of this caliber that raises Modiano above the level of the normal detective novelist. But also the question of where the protagonist's inquiries will take him. I do not want to say too much, but it becomes clear that his story will come to a head during the period of German occupation. Modiano has said that many of his novels use memory to explore the experience of his father, who was Jewish but survived the occupation. That does not appear to be the specific theme here, although references to "those years of night" crop up increasingly among the protagonist's informants. Although the novel builds to a climax that manages to be exciting and desolate at the same time, there have been other authors since who have pulled the net tighter and painted in darker tones. In short, I see this as an approachable and meaningful introduction to the work of this latest Nobelist, though I suspect that the reason for his winning the Prize has more to do with the totality of his oeuvre than the quality of any one book. [4.5 stars]
*Since I read the novel in French, all translations (however inadequate) are mine.
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