He continually reintroduces the story, and then he transitions into the past where desire and remembrance tug at the heart strings of who we were, who we knew and who we have become. How are we the same when we are no longer the person we used to be? ... This is where The Third Man-meets-Humphrey Bogart noir wet dream builds the conflict. There is intrigue, there are missing persons, there are affairs of the heart and body. There is the cliché existential wandering that would make Camus proud ... Modiano has continued his celebrated life’s work in these pages. The mystery, the journey, is the story. And the beauty of his prose shines once again in this deep, short read that provokes the trappings of too many musings and desires, albeit a welcome provocation.
The overlap, the back-and-forth, may seem repetitious, but it isn’t. Rather, it makes reading any single Modiano book like encountering one installment in an ongoing, multivolume work. This press of memory becomes more resonant the more one reads ... As to whom he is addressing, it could be anyone: his readers, the other characters in the novel, himself. And yet, that makes his work only more compelling, like an ouroboros of the inner life. This, Modiano insists, is where we are, born out of history into a state of unknowing, in which memory and forgetting blur into a fantasy that can never be fulfilled.
The setup is classically Modianesque. The protagonist, writer Jean Daragane, bearing a considerable degree of resemblance to the author himself, is plunged into a mysterious investigation, obliged to play the amateur sleuth. The subject of the search remains tantalisingly – or excruciatingly, according to one’s tolerance for ambiguity – just out of frame ... Layers of stories within stories are recounted so evocatively that, although you think you know what has happened, when you try to pin anything down it falls away like sand ... While this is one of his shorter novels, it is also one of his densest; with each Modiano novel, the intertextual richness increases further ... In what is otherwise a smooth and faithful translation of deceptively simple prose, there are a couple of awkward features ... Modiano reaffirms an unsettling trope of circularity which falls short, naturally, of closure.
...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.
Modiano makes his readers hunt for links 'like the piece of a jigsaw puzzle that has been lost'. A little sleuthing shows that some of the names and addresses cited in the novel allude to the worst horrors of the Occupation years. He never spells them out. Meanwhile, in the foreground, the child's sense of abandonment incubates a grief that, if triggered, may 'unfurl through the years' like the fuse on a rediscovered wartime bomb. Euan Cameron's atmospheric translation does ample justice to this spectral tale.
Claustrophobic, moody, none-more-noir novel ... 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...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 ... Vintage Modiano, and a pleasure for fans of neonoir fiction.
A quietly haunting search for the truth—or at least for the facts—of a postwar French childhood, Nobel-winner Modiano’s novel spins out over a summer in which 'everything is uncertain' ... Modiano’s text rewards the patient reader—as this time-hopping account of coincidences, uncertainties, and echoes of a half-forgotten history unfolds, 'the present and the past merge together,' building toward a powerful, memorable conclusion.
