So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood

by Patrick Modiano Narrated by Bronson Pinchot

Overview

A haunting novel of suspense from the winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature.

In the stillness of his Paris apartment, Jean Daragane has built a life of total solitude. Then a surprising phone call shatters the silence of an unusually hot September, and the threatening voice on the other end of the line leaves Daragane wary but irresistibly curious. Almost at once, he finds himself entangled with a shady gambler and a beautiful, fragile young woman, who draw Daragane into the mystery of a decades-old murder. The investigation will force him to confront the memory of a trauma he had all but buried.

With So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood Patrick Modiano adds a new chapter to a body of work whose supreme psychological insight and subtle, atmospheric writing have earned him worldwide renown-including the Nobel Prize in Literature. This masterly novel, now translated into twenty languages, penetrates the deepest enigmas of identity and compels us to ask whether we ever know who we truly are.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"Modiano is an ideal writer to gorge on ... in part because [his books] make up a system as beguiling and complete as any in contemporary literature ... [So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood] set[s] up a moody, delectable noir."—The New Yorker "A suspenseful inquiry into memory and storytelling, including the stories we tell ourselves about our own lives. It’s the best kind of mystery, the kind that never stops haunting you. A–."—Entertainment Weekly "[Modiano's] fiction resonates so deeply [because] it occupies an elusive middle ground between place and personality ... Resonant ... Compelling."—Los Angeles Times "Euan Cameron's atmospheric translation does ample justice to this spectral tale."—Independent "There is intrigue, there are missing persons, there are affairs of the heart and body ... The beauty of [Modiano's] prose shines once again in this deep, short read."—Paste "Moody ... Lyrical ... Vintage Modiano, and a pleasure for fans of neonoir fiction."—Kirkus Reviews —

Kirkus Reviews

2015-07-01
Claustrophobic, moody, none-more-noir novel by French Nobel Prize winner Modiano (Suspended Sentences, 2014, etc.).Phone calls don't happen often in Jean Daragne's world. He's sealed himself off in a Paris apartment, shutters drawn always, but especially now during an unusually strong heat wave that "emphasized his loneliness." Still, he goes out from time to time, losing his address book on one small excursion away from his study. Therein lies the rub, for now his phone is ringing, and on the other end is a voice insistently offering to return his contacts to him. But why does the caller want to know about a character who, we learn in painstakingly deliberate time, figures in a novel that Daragne wrote years earlier and had forgotten about? Indeed, Daragne has forgotten a great deal that Gilles Ottolini, small-time crook and erstwhile jockey, would like to remind him of, not least a murder that took place more than half a century earlier. Modiano writes tantalizingly, offering just a part of a detail here and another there, inviting the reader to participate in Daragne's bewilderment (Why him? Why now?), the unfolding identities of the players (Is Ottolini a blackmailer? Is Chantal a femme fatale or a pawn? Just what is the relationship between Annie Astrand and the perhaps half-American Roger Vincent?), and the hallucinatory stroll into a past that constantly raises as many questions as it answers. Modiano blends elements of the procedural, the ghost story, and the existentialist novels of his youth to unpeel an extremely juicy onion at whose core, in the end, would seem to be a meditation on the nature of memory and storytelling alike: "Perhaps he had gathered together all these disparate elements in the hope that Daragne would react to one of them…." Lyrical and portentous—and sometimes even "dreary and threatening," as Daragne describes the voice at the other end of the line. Vintage Modiano, and a pleasure for fans of neonoir fiction.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169550863
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	08/29/2016
Edition description:	Unabridged

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