In the Café of Lost Youth

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In this life that sometimes seems to be a vast, ill-defined landscape without signposts, amid all of the vanishing lines and the lost horizons, we hope to find reference points, to draw up some sort of land registry so as to shake the impression that we are navigating by chance. So we forge ties, we try to find stability in the chance encounters.” 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. Note: This review refers to the US/New York Review Books edition, translated by Chris Clarke; the UK edition (MacLehose Press, also 2016) was translated by Euan Cameron.]

Roland and other characters are interested in the mystical and otherworldly. Roland himself is particularly interested in the idea of the eternal return, the idea that everything reoccurs over and over again. One of the characters holds séances and Louki becomes interested in this subject as well. However, like much in Modiano novels, the bookshop associated with these ideas disappears and the topic fades away with the characters. A week or so ago I posted a review of another one of Modiano’s novels called Young Once. I didn’t rate that one very highly because I felt it was a bit unfinished. But it’s as if Young Once was a preliminary sketch or a rough draft for Café of Lost Youth which is much more developed and has much better writing. There are a lot of similarities in the two novels. For example, in Young Once we learn that the two main characters, a man and a woman are both 35. In Café, they are not that old but we learn they were born within a month of each other. Every area described is also imbued with layers of emotion. . . . Readers are left haunted by the cityscape Modiano paints.”—Henri Astier, The Times Literary Supplement Modiano is a pure original. He has transformed the novel into a laboratory for producing atmospheres, not situations--where everything must be inferred and nothing can be proved."--Adam Thirwell, The Guardian 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 RepublicI have seen all the characters who might have lost their youth, and those clinging hard to what´s left of it. The elegant, haunting story of the forgotten people and places of Paris from the reigning Nobel Laureate. Louki's escapes started years before as a lonely child left to fend for herself by an unknown father and a mother working long evening hours at a cabaret in Pigalle. She started to walk the night streets alone as a teenager, got in trouble with the police and sought help from a friendly woman casually met on the street, ending in the circle of local drug smugglers from another small cafe. 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:

Ever-present through this story is the city of Paris, almost another character in her own right. This is the Paris of ‘no-man’s-lands’, of lonely journeys on the last metro, or nocturnal walks along empty boulevards; of cafés where the lost youth wander in, searching for meaning, and the older generation sift through their memories of their own long-gone adolescence. A short, pensive novel of bohemian Paris just after the war, Nobel Prize winner Modiano’s ( Missing Person, 2015, etc.) favorite time and place.In the case of the student, he seems more concerned about hiding the fact that he is still a student, at the nearby École Supérieure des Mines. He is a winner of the 1972 Grand prix du roman de l'Académie française, and the 1978 Prix Goncourt for his novel "Rue des boutiques obscures". Indeed, when one late night he catches a ride home with Louki and Maurice Raphaël (like Arthur Adamov, who also frequents the café in the novel, a real-life figure -- and a man of many pseudonyms and guises), he realizes that neither even knows his name. So, Monsieur Modiano, I now have to unfriend you. Unlike you, I have found meaning in my life that I mean to retain. Loosely, the story revolves around a mysterious young Bohemian woman, Louki, described from several points of view: a young student who frequents the same café; a private-eye hired by her much-older husband to find her; Roland, her friend and possible lover; and Louki herself.

Every area described is also imbued with layers of emotion. . . . Readers are left haunted by the cityscape Modiano paints." --Henri Astier, The Times Literary Supplement We are dealing with 4 narrators, who reconstruct the story of Jacqueline Delanque, known as " Louki ", in the circle of artists with whom she spent her time. The third narrator is Louki herself, who tells us that her big drama comes precisely from the fact that she never had anyone close to her. Nothing special, you could think, that's a normal drama, if we could say so.... Young, disaffected students along with the failed and weary are the patrons of the cafe Condé—collectively known as “the lost Youth,” gathering throughout day and night to pass time. It turns out Louki was one of those beautiful young women who at 15 looked 20. She never knew her father. Her mother, a dancer at Moulin Rouge, leaves her daughter home alone each night until the wee hours of the morning. At that early age Louki starts going off on her own into the Paris night scene.The story begins when we learn that Louki has left her husband (older, wealthy, adoring, boring). The private investigator hired by her husband to find Louki starts falling in love with her. 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. En medio de esos personajes, destaca una tal Louki, a la que todos se refieren en sus recuerdos. Louki aglutina el puzzle que gira en torno a las memorias de varios personajes de la novela. goodreads που δεν μας δίνει τη δυνατότητα του μισού αστεριού γιατί ήθελα να βάλω ακριβώς 3,5 αστεράκια. Ούτε 3 ούτε 4. Τελοσπάντων, θα πάει αυτή τη φορά υπέρ του συγγραφέως. Μου άρεσε πολύ αυτή η δεύτερη επαφή με τον Μοντιάνο. Ένα πραγματικά νοσταλγικό αναγνωστικό ταξίδι στο παρελθόν, μια αποθέωση του Παρισιού. Μυρωδιές, εικόνες μιας άλλης εποχής.