Neutral zones have at least one advantage: They are only a starting point and we always leave them sooner or later. 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. 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 point of this novel, or memoir, or episode is the wandering, vagabond life of Roland and Louki, who spend days and nights crossing and recrossing Paris and ending up in one small hotel after another. (...) This is an opaque and troubled novel which casts an uneasy spell and is imbued not only with regret for lost youth but equally regrettably with something like lost nerve." - Anita Brookner, The Spectator Although charged with trying to find her, Caisley ultimately decides he'll throw Louki's husband of the scent; yet even in doing the right thing can't see where it leads, the words of his generous gesture reading far differently in the story's conclusion: There were two entrances to the café, but she always opted for the narrower one hidden in the shadows."

I had chosen it to simplify matters, an all-purpose, everyday name, one that could also serve as a last name. Like W.G. Sebald, another European writer haunted by memory and by the history that took place just before he was born, Modiano combines a detective's curiosity with an elegist's melancholy."--Adam Kirsch, The New Republic 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. En el café de la juventud perdida pretende retratar a una cierta generación de jóvenes en el París de los años sesenta. Para ello, toma como punto de referencia un cierto café Condé donde se reunían una serie de bohemios, la mayoría veinteañeros y algunos adultos que se mezclaban bien con esos jóvenes. Todos tienen en común un afán de vivir y beber el presente. Además del alcohol, algunos consumen drogas.Her stab at marriage, the orbits of the Condé, her relationship with Roland seem like efforts to find a role and place -- but none are sufficient. So, Monsieur Modiano, I now have to unfriend you. Unlike you, I have found meaning in my life that I mean to retain. Every area described is also imbued with layers of emotion. . . . Readers are left haunted by the cityscape Modiano paints.