In the Café of Lost Youth

by Patrick Modiano, Chris Clarke (Translator)

Overview

NYRB Classics Original
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

In the Café of Lost Youth is vintage Patrick Modiano, an absorbing evocation of a particular Paris of the 1950s, shadowy and shady, a secret world of writers, criminals, drinkers, and drifters. The novel, inspired in part by the circle (depicted in the photographs of Ed van der Elsken) of the notorious and charismatic Guy Debord, centers on the enigmatic, waiflike figure of Louki, who catches everyone’s attention even as she eludes possession or comprehension. Through the eyes of four very different narrators, including Louki herself, we contemplate her character and her fate, while Modiano explores the themes of identity, memory, time, and forgetting that are at the heart of his spellbinding and deeply moving art.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781590179536
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	03/08/2016
Series:	NYRB Classics Series
Pages:	128
Sales rank:	209,523
Product dimensions:	4.98(w) x 7.99(h) x 0.37(d)

About the Author

Patrick Modiano was born in the Boulogne-Billancourt suburb of Paris near the end of the Nazi occupation of France. He studied at the Lycée Henri-IV and the Sorbonne. As a teenager he took geometry lessons with the writer Raymond Queneau, who would play a key role in his development. He has written more than thirty works of fiction, including novels, children’s books, and the screenplay for Louis Malle’s film Lacombe, Lucien. In 2014, Modiano won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Chris Clarke was born and raised in British Columbia, Canada, and lives and works in and around New York City. His published translations include work by Oulipo members Raymond Queneau and Olivier Salon. He currently teaches French and is translating a novel by Pierre Mac Orlan, which will be published in 2016.

Editorial Reviews

[M]odiano at his height. In 1950s Paris, a young woman nicknamed Louki haunts a café called the Condé, casting a decided allure yet remaining mysterious and unknowable. A young hanger-on, the husband she abandoned, the detective searching for her—all try to grasp her and fail. Not unexpectedly, Modiano withholds her secret life to the end.” —Library Journal, starred review

“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 

“Modiano’s books develop a different tone, one more mellow and melancholic, somewhere between sepia and film noir, more akin to the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson than to the work of other writers.” —Rachel Donadio, The New York Times

“[An] edge of mystery, of indirection, motivates [Modiano’s work] like an animating force...a vivid air of the conditional, which is, of course, the whole idea. For Modiano, memory, experience are fluid, fleeting, and even the stories we tell ourselves are subject to change. Our lives flicker past us like the afterimage of a photo; eventually, our attempts at constancy must fall away.”—David Ulin, Los Angeles Times
 
“Modiano is a pure original. He has transformed the novel into a laboratory for producing atmospheres, not situations—where everything must be inferred and nothing can be proved.”—Adam Thirwell, The Guardian
 
“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

“The genius of Modiano's work lies in how it straddles the very real moral chaos of post-Vichy France and his creation of an idiosyncratic milieu. Patrick Modiano goes beyond the checklist accuracies of historical fiction, fashioning a lush fever dream filled with glamor, mystery, and despair.” —Karl Wolff, New York Journal of Books

“[C]arefully, artfully constructed...[an] impressive, accomplished work.” —M.A. Orthofer, Complete Review

From the Publisher

★ 01/01/2016
Appearing in English for the first time, these two volumes capture Nobel Prize winner Modiano in self-defining mode. Published in 1981, Young Once reveals the author shaking off maximalist language and exposition as he shows Louis and Odile looking back at their early, shadier years in Paris. Uneasy nostalgia may be common, but Modiano's take—and wonderfully scraped-down language—is not. In the Café of Lost Youth, which followed in 2007, is even more distilled, representing Modiano at his height. In 1950s Paris, a young woman nicknamed Louki haunts a café called the Condé, casting a decided allure yet remaining mysterious and unknowable. A young hanger-on, the husband she abandoned, the detective searching for her—all try to grasp her and fail. Not unexpectedly, Modiano withholds her secret life to the end. VERDICT Two more great examples of Modiano's writing, with Young Once somewhat more accessible and In the Café of Lost Youth perhaps the better book.

Library Journal

2015-12-21
A short, pensive novel of bohemian Paris just after the war, Nobel Prize winner Modiano's (Missing Person, 2015, etc.) favorite time and place. "She had known right from the outset that things would turn out badly for us." With names like Tarzan, Fred, and La Houpa, it's no wonder the young, disaffected patrons of the Condé—collectively known as "the lost Youth," and some of them true juvenile delinquents plunged unwillingly into early adulthood—are at a dead end. The war is over, the Nazis are gone, and meaning has been drained from life. Ah, but there's always Louki to provide the lookie-loo itch for everyone to scratch, young and elegant and very quiet. Who is she, and why is she with "the brown-haired guy in the suede jacket"? So, at the formative stages of a minor obsession, ponders our initial narrator, whose point of view is just one of several. One might as well ask who anyone is, for, as that narrator reveals, everyone at the Condé lives in the present, no one talks about the past, and the smarter of the patrons are bound up in endless discussions concerning "pataphysics, lettrism, automatic writing, metagraphics," and other such heady matters. Louki's identity, always hazy, takes clearer form as the slender narrative progresses—and as it does, some of the entanglements become a little more dangerous, and to downright tragic effect in at least one case. Much of the novel is based on the informal circle run by the now canonical philosopher Guy Debord, whose double in this novel is himself obsessed by the escapist novel Lost Horizons. Modiano touches on themes of intellectual despair and ennui without ever quite slipping into Camus-ian bleakness, but more, he writes of memory, impression, and our cursed inability to know, truly know, what reality is, to say nothing of the person across the table from us. Evocative and perfectly written—trademark Modiano, in other words.

Kirkus Reviews