Reading Modiano's Rue des Boutiques Obscures - What a lovely, lovely way to spend a cold Sunday. Contemporary French literature at its best.

Missing Person, by Patrick Modiano, is a languid, hypnotic tale about a detective, plagued by amnesia for almost 20 years, who tries to establish his own identity.

For a more detailed review, please visit my blog.

An unusual novel by a Nobel Prize–winning French author who was born in 1945 but who is apparently obsessed with the period of the French Occupation (1940–44). This story takes place about 10 years after the end of World War II and is set mostly in Paris. A man called Guy Roland has no memory of his life before about 1943. He's been working for a private detective, a man who is retiring and moving to Nice just as this book begins. It's not ever clear how the two men met or why the detective employed Guy, but now Guy embarks in earnest on a quest to uncover his own past. He has almost nothing to go on. Like a trail of breadcrumbs, an interview with one person leads to another, and to another. A box of photos is acquired. Guy might be a man in one of the photos — or maybe not.

The writing is very straightforward, plain and sparse like Chandler's or Hammett's, and at one point a past murder is mentioned and I had to wonder whether Guy will turn out of have been involved in that. There is a woman in the photos who may or may not have been Guy's wife. It's mysterious, but I found it believable, and Guy gets some help (via correspondence) in his investigations from a friend of his old employer. Some people are hard to track down. Some are impossible. And what do we know about anyone, really? A list of addresses where they lived. A birth date, and their parents' names. An occupation.

With no overt reference at all to the war, the occupation, or the Nazis, the story nevertheless makes clear that Guy and some people he knew felt the need to escape Paris and probably France in 1943. Obviously that's the same time when his amnesia began. What happened?

In ways this story reminded me of noir films, or Hitchcock, but not as paranoid. No one is out to get Guy. It's almost as if he never existed. No one knows him. It made me think about how tenuous our lives are. Scraps of memory return to Guy, but he never finds anyone who can fill in all the gaps. The war upended so many lives, it was like a break in the timeline. The loose ends might have frustrated me in a story written by another author, but Patrick Modiano effectively cast a spell on me, and when I reached the end I felt grateful, and a little awed.

(There's a letter dated 1965 in the story, so maybe I'm wrong for thinking Guy's quest takes place in the mid–1950s — but Guy clearly states his amnesia began 10 years prior, and that must have been during the occupation.)

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Hutte, for instance, used to quote the case of a fellow he called "the beach man." This man had spent forty years of his life on beaches or by the sides of swimming pools, chatting pleasantly with summer visitors and rich idlers. He is to be seen, in his bathing costume, in the corners and backgrounds of thousands of holiday snaps, among groups of happy people, but no one knew his name and why he was there. And no one noticed when one day he vanished from the photographs.

A.S. Byatt once noted she finished David Mitchell's Ghostwritten at a busy airport baggage carousel and found the location infinitely appropriate. Likewise I found myself this morning in a darkened swirl of insomnia and read the final 100 pages of Missing Person. Periodically I stared about our quiet living room. I looked at where this afternoon I'll put the Christmas tree I buy at the supermarket. I looked out the window and the neighbors' seasonal lights. I don't question why we don't employ our own. I just don't. Life is often hazy and ill-defined. I wish I had the means at the disposal of Modiano's protagonist. I certainly liked this one better than my previous exposure to the Nobel Laureate. I think the sinister whispers of history were significant here. I'd recommend Missing Person as a premium point of departure for this strange author.

intriguing and melancholy

Loved this little book! A man was trying on different leads to who he might actually be as he doesn't know his identity. 1 clue leads him to another person and maybe another him and on, and on. The setting is marvellous! It's in Paris and surrounding areas before and during war time. Such a unique writing style [translated from French] Just really delicate as opposed to the "hit me over my head" books I usually use! Don't remember how I found out about it, but soon glad I did.

Read on the Road: Saigon trip 2016