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Dans le Café de la Jeunnesse Perdue

Vagabonds in Paris

Patrick Modiano
Gallimard, 149pp, £14.50,

Anita Brookner

Wednesday, 16th January 2008

Anita Brookner on Patrick Modiano's new book

Patrick Modiano is a nostalgic novelist who has consistently shown courage in investigating the boundaries between duty and loyalty. This ambiguity has featured in all his novels and seems to have had its roots in the character of his own father, whose activities in the troubled era of wartime and post-war Paris have left their mark on his writing. Conscious of his flawed moral inheritance, Modiano has applied himself to testing the limits of his own freedom and has found that shame is not so easily dispersed. It is a quality that inhabits all his elegantly written novels and is equally present in Dans le Café de la Jeunesse Perdue which reverts to the same troubled era as its predecessors and occupies a doubtful position on the periphery of the natural order. He finds even less reassurance in the role of hapless investigator of another’s misdemeanours, thus compromising his own conscience, apparently without relief.

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