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

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One of these ties Louki hopes will give her direction in life is marriage to a wealthy businessman. Yet, despite the showroom apartment in posh Neuilly and the attentions of her husband, Louki feels imprisoned by the bourgois lifestyle and runs away. ("Two photo-booth snapshots, one facing the camera, one in profile. And that's what we're supposed to forge links with?") including Louki herself, while Modiano explores the themes of identity, memory, and forgetting that are at the heart of his work: To try to reclaim the past though memory and exploration, always falling short of that hopeless goal of retrieval. It turns out Louki was one of those beautiful young women who at 15 looked 20. She never knew her father. Her mother, a dancer at Moulin Rouge, leaves her daughter home alone each night until the wee hours of the morning. At that early age Louki starts going off on her own into the Paris night scene. There are four narrators (a student in a cafe, a private detective hired by a husband, the main protagonist herself and one of her lovers) and they take a section each in such a way that the whole novel builds a picture of Jacqueline Delanque (aka Louki). Building you own picture of Louki is perhaps one of the key elements of the story so I won’t include any details here. But Eternal Recurrence is a repeating phrase and several sci-fi books put in multiple appearances.

In the Café of Lost Youth is an atmospheric exploration of people drifting through, and eventually out of, time. Time and memory are veils through which Modiano’s narrators attempt to capture, or recapture, something impossible to hold: the ghosts of the past and paths never followed. Though the narrators do not intend this — they’re genuinely searching for something lost — their stories read like elegies.The story begins when we learn that Louki has left her husband (older, wealthy, adoring, boring). The private investigator hired by her husband to find Louki starts falling in love with her. In particular, Modiano was fascinated by van der Elsken’s photographs of the circle of Guy Debord, whom he renames Guy de Vere. Debord was a French Marxist thinker in Paris at that time, who taught classes/held meetings in various places around the city. Louki, who had said she was a college student but was really not, was impressed by de Vere, and attended some of his meetings, read some of his work and the work he suggested she read.

But not last week, when, anxiously searching for a classic, to make me forget about this damn pandemic, I found this volume, and I didn't miss the opportunity again. I had some reluctance, though, I always have it, when it comes to an author I don't have many references to. Louki's portrait is sketched by four narrators, each of them in his or her own way a drifter through life who seeks refuge among the friendly and slightly decadent atmosphere of a bar at night. 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. Of course, if we did get those details, the book would fall apart. It is not, after all, a book about Louki. It’s a book about seeking for Louki, a process Louki herself is engaged in. Though she remains at a distance from us, there is a richness in exploring why she does this . . . and why the others are drawn to her and to this lost time. Louki is in fact alive. In body. But her soul is endlessly unstill. Whether she's "here, there or elsewhere. In (her) beginning."I love Modiano. He’s a beautiful writer. In this book there is mystery, with a touch of existentialist noir, and melancholy. I see once again people find he 1) writes the same book, over and over, like any mystery writer and 2) he is boring. His Goodreads average is very low, 3.48, but for me he is an old friend, who creates an aura I recall in The White Rabbit and the Del Rio. Hmm, maybe I’ll go out for drink and talk to some strangers at that little bar down the street, get to know them, at least a little. . . The cemetery at Montparnasse, not far from where Louki lives, is shown here: https://www.tumblr.com/ Photo by SerpentKiss Every area described is also imbued with layers of emotion. . . . Readers are left haunted by the cityscape Modiano paints. And whereas Bowing tries to create 'fixed points' for reference -- "it's almost like a police register or a precinct logbook", one person observes -- Roland had tried to write a text in those days called On Neutral Zones, trying to chart: A closer relationship develops between Louki and Roland -- but both are still very young (Louki is only twenty-two -- fourteen years younger than her husband), adrift and searching.

In the Café of Lost Youth is a kind of suspense story. It is a story about the many facets of a single woman but also, unquestionably, a story about the multiple worlds within Paris, a city that, as much as any individual human being, remains essentially unknowable. It casts a near hypnotic spell.”—Douglas Kennedy, L’Express Every area described is also imbued with layers of emotion. . . . Readers are left haunted by the cityscape Modiano paints.”—Henri Astier, The Times Literary Supplement She was taking refuge here, at the Condé, as if she were running from something, trying to escape some danger. “ It was without the slightest trace of lightheartedness that I returned to that apartment each night. I knew that sooner or later I would leave it for good. I was counting a great deal on the people I would eventually meet, which would put an end to my loneliness. This girl was my first encounter and perhaps she would help me take flight on my own.The alleged photographer is next up as narrator and we learn that he is not a photographer. The final two narrators are Louki herself and, finally, Roland, who becomes her boyfriend.