Missing Person

This is a kind of detective story, with lots of Simenonish mid-20th century Paris atmosphere. An amnesiac private detective is trying to track down his own earlier life. Modiano is obviously a big fan of unanswered questions, so he never really tells us when the foreground story is set, but we are allowed to realise that the key events in the back-story took place during the German occupation. The main characters are all more-or-less from the generation of Modiano's parents, so we're probably somewhere in the late fifties, about twenty years before the book was written.

Of course, it turns out that every piece of information that our detective manages to discover about himself only raises more questions. The witnesses who could have show more given him the full story are either dead or have disappeared; his own memories, when they start to come back, are not entirely trustworthy; names and addresses turn out to be false; individual stories refuse to connect together into a closed narrative. If the past is another country, then as far as Modiano is concerned he will always be an illegal immigrant there. Obviously a lot of this is Modiano dealing with his own peculiar background, but it does also seem to be saying more general things about the - possibly misleading - ways in which memory and narrative work together. show less

Guy Roland describes himself as nothing. And he might just be right. Certainly the name ‘Guy Roland’ is as made up as his dubious identity papers. But when Hutte, at whose detective agency he has worked for the past ten years, got him the name and papers, he thought he was doing him a favour. With no memory of his past, Guy might as well be ‘Guy’. And something also must have forewarned Guy not to search too assiduously for himself, because he has been working at a detective agency for ten years before he even begins to search in earnest. By now the trail is mostly cold. As are the bodies that many people tell him are just part of the past.

With elements of noire — fog shrouded Parisian nights, murders witnessed or abetted, show more false identities, and a host of Russian, American, and British ex-pats — Modiano’s novel leaps the boundaries of genre. Neither the hard-bitten detective story, nor the existentialist mire. For how could the nothing that is Guy have enough presence to even define himself through action? Guy is not much more than smoke, and like memories of childhood, ever fleeting and retreating. Even his best clues lead him astray. And when he does settle upon who he thinks he might have been, he is as uncertain as he might be if he had simply invented his past.

The writing here is crisp and pressing. And the pacing is precise. Even when you think the novel may be headed toward a satisfying (in one sense) denouement it switches back and leaves you, along with Guy, bereft.

Highly recommended. show less

Guy Roland hasn’t known his true identity for at least a decade, since Paris was occupied during WWII. His name isn’t his own. It was given to him by his boss, Hutte, the owner of the detective agency where Guy has worked since he hired Hutte to discover his identity. It never happened. Now Hutte has retired to Nice, leaving Guy with time to search for clues to his past.

He criss-crosses Paris talking to people, garnering clues, doing research at Hutte’s empty office, and getting records from files through Hutte’s contacts. People share their memories, photos and mementos with Guy. He gets closer to his old identity until he’s pretty sure he’s there. Then he wants to find out what happened to his friends, which takes him show more eventually to Polynesia.

Modiano’s writing (and the translation) is entrancing, enthralling. The closing thought of the story as Guy peruses a childhood photo in which one of his lost companions is crying is “do not our lives dissolve into the evening as quickly as this grief of childhood?” show less

Ten years ago, amnesiac Guy Rowland hired a private investigator to figure out who he was and where he came from. Soon afterwards, the PI gave Guy a new identity and a job as the PI's assistant, saying that sometimes it's best not to remember who you are. But now that his good friend and employer has retired, Guy again begins his search for identity.

Reading this book made me understand why Modiano won the Nobel Prize in literature. The prose was almost poetic, and the imagery was gripping. For instance, he found a drained, emotionally dying clue to his past in a run-down bar. The whole chapter was filled with coffin and morgue imagery, complete with an "embalmed man" who observed everything, no matter how stimulating, without blinking show more an eye. All of Modiano's chapters were set up in this way - with vivid imagery fitting the clue that he had found - though the imagery was always dark and mysterious.

Unsurprising for a book about amnesia, the over-arching theme of the story was identity. Who am I? Does my past change who I am? These questions are explored as Guy's own vision of who he is transforms as he gets more clues. We can only wonder at the end if he's really found his real self, or if he's just adopted the identity of a man who fits the person Guy wants to be.

I definitely urge you to read Missing Person. I hope I find the time to read more Modiano in the future. show less

missing person by Patrick Mondiano 5/5

Mondiano weaves a mesmerizing tale of search for what one once was.

The setting, post WWII France, lends layers of mystery to his search for himself. Our protagonist has memory only of the last 10 years of his life and has reached the point that he cannot continue to live in ignorance of his past. He follows faint threads, some leading nowhere, some bearing slight fruit.

The success or failure of his quest is not the most important part of the story. The quest is the thing, the searching, probing, meeting and interviewing people he may or may not have known in his previous life.

Does it matter who we were in the past? Is it possible to insert ourselves into another's life? Would we even want to. show more Are we able to manufacture a past for ourselves? While these questions are not answered, the fact that they are asked makes for a fascinating story.

Highly Recommended. show less

داستان همچون کابوسی است نرم و آهسته و طولانی در مه با تصاویری که پس از بیداری تا ساعت‌ها در ذهن رژه می‌رود و تا روزها در ذهن می‌ماند. و آدم‌هایی که از دل تاریکی می‌آیند و در دل برف و سرما و بی سرانجام ناپدید می‌شوند. آدم‌هایی که هیچ نیستند مگر نیمرخی ضدنور در بالکن کافه‌ای بارانی... برخلاف ترجمه ضعیف (هرچند روان) در این کتاب بیش از دیگر آثار مودیانو شناور شدم.

"[B]ut what she said." [end of text] — Kafka, "The Castle"

Modiano, is, in some way, the opposite of Handke: we sense he is always making a mistake (Handke writes "Deep Blue"). Our author is constructing a story of loss whose heroines, unlike in Sebald (Austerlitz), are not stored in carbonic (maid) nor celluloid (mother). Here, we are seeking the Polaroid, going after the (ephemeral) magazine, recalling the issue our chief character borrows with a promise and fails to return. A history of magazines not returned. Nobody seems to ask any questions. Eager to believe. He is always responding 'yes' as if at a séance or motivational interview. And we sense our narrator has never actually left that office full of books of faded show more directories bequeathed at the outset of his journey - playing, instead, an Oulipian game of construction: semantic connections, constellations (and makeup) on empty space.

But this is just a kind of bad writing (there are good and bad ways to do Oulipo), arising from the space of imagination and always making a mistake. Among those we know to practice confabulation (I am seeking a less pejorative term), O'Connor's efforts are most frail, Joyce Carol Oates a little better with history to stand on, Murnane's are more complex (Because he is always scraping the imaginary landscape to the bone. (This is how, at his most successful, we are occasionally getting the so-called Murnane-sentence, hardly more than a phrase, which is trying to go a little deeper.)) It sometimes takes more imagination to do nothing at all. Modiano, who has surely read Kafka (The Castle), may have done better to cut our novella short mid-sentence during that scene adrift in the Swiss Alps (also the halting point of my memory of the text). show less