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

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Every area described is also imbued with layers of emotion. . . . Readers are left haunted by the cityscape Modiano paints. The writing is curiously detached. At one point, I was bizarrely reminded of Winnie-the-Pooh when Piglet says he can take part in a Woozle hunt because he has nothing to do until Friday. All the people in this novel seem to be drifting: Step by step though, the author guided me from the tourist view to the disturbing, sad inner landscape of people living at the edge of society – misfits, bohemians, loners – a group of mostly young people who meet at the 'Conde' more to hide from the world than to plan to take it by storm. The main theme that Modiano seems to posit is the idea of fixed points and neural zones. Indeed, Roland plans to write an essay on the topic and makes some headway on it but does not seem to finish it. The idea is that we all have (or want) fixed points. Bowing is the one who is most interested in this topic. He argues that big cities are like maelstroms in which we get lost, so we seek out fixed points. For him it is the cafés of Paris. We know he keeps a record of the comings and goings at the Condé. His idea would be to have a register of all the cafés of Paris over the past hundred years. Stopping at a Tabac buying Le Parisien and exchanging the obligatory courtesies, sitting in Parc des Buttes-Chaumont watching life pass by. Taking in the facades of the buildings in the Quartier Tolbiac, almost expecting to bump into Nestor Burma when I turn the next corner.

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale. 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. There is a sense of sadness as I begin to write my review of this book. Sadness because the book is about someone or something lost; the titular youth or the selves each of the four narrators has left behind. But also sadness because nothing is crystal clear, there is no certainty or redemption anywhere.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. 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

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. 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 Bohemis, universitaris, escriptors i filòsofs es troben al “Condé”, un cafè on quatre narradors intenten recordar les seves vides mentre naveguen a la deriva del seu present. Però a diferència de la “recerca” de Proust, el temps i la memoria són irrecuperables, ja que es dissolen juntament amb les llistes de noms, adreces i estacions de metro que intenten, futilment, donar un cert sentit de permanència als vagabunds existencials que habiten aquesta història. Modiano’s latest novel to be published in English is In the Café of Lost Youth ( New York Review Books), first published in France by Gallimard in 2007. Like most of his novels, In the Café of Lost Youth is short enough to be read in one sitting, and that is exactly how one should read this book, preferably while sitting in the café of one’s choice. In the Café of Lost Youth hovers around the enigmatic young woman known as “Louki,” who wanders in and out of the lives of the novel’s various narrators. When we first encounter Louki we are told that there is nothing habitual about her. In fact, she haunts the narrative like a ghost or an ill-formed presence waiting to join the action, but for whatever reason, is not able to fully engage the other characters. “She wasn’t regular about her visits. You might find her sitting there very early in the morning. Or sometimes she appeared at midnight and stayed until closing time.” By what right do we intrude, forcing our way in like common crooks, and by what presumptuousness do we delve into their heads and into their hearts—and ask them to account for themselves? By what authority?”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: Paris, 1950s. We're inside a café called Condé. Bohemian youth and some older men form the crowd of this Condé, where our central character walks in. She's a young lady, mysterious, elegant and awkwardly quiet in her ways. The regulars at the café call her Louki, but no one apparently knows her real name. Related to that is Roland’s neutral zones. For him these are areas in Paris where one is nowhere specific, between a particular district and its neighbour, a no man’s land (he uses the English term in the French text) where one is not tied to a specific neighbourhood. These two ideas will reoccur throughout the book. Both Louki and the PI are rootless with no moorings and, it’s as if their concern for landmarks and neighborhoods of Paris substitute as a way of grounding themselves in something. One of the characters implies this and the author is famous for his local color of Paris. We get street names, plazas, how buildings disappeared or were re-purposed and how neighborhoods have changed or stayed the same. How a café located in one neighborhood really “belongs” in another.