RaveLondon Review of Books (UK)It’s a short, riveting, exploratory work ... The Man Who Lived Underground seems startlingly contemporary in its treatment of police violence against an innocent black man ... the book is much less of a protest novel than Native Son, and takes even greater liberties with naturalism. Its setting and atmosphere—chases through sewers, frenzied manhunts—recall noirish films like Fritz Lang’s M and Carol Reed’s The Third Man. The writing combines the blunt rhythms of hard-boiled detective fiction with kinetic, almost phantasmagorical strokes, intensities of emotion and colour ... Rather than hardening his sense of individual identity, racist persecution leads [the protagonist] to an almost cosmic awareness of what he shares with others.
Patrick Modiano, trans. by Euan Cameron
MixedThe London Review of Books...although the people and places in this frustrating puzzle – rue de l’Arcade, rue de Charonne, square du Graisivaudan – promise to throw light on his own life, they don’t seem to add up to anything ... So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighbourhood will be familiar to anyone who has read a Modiano: intrigue and exasperation, the incantatory repetition of street names and addresses, the implication that all of this has happened before in another life that the passage of time has rendered nearly invisible.
