Missing Person (Verba Mundi Book)

Winner of the Prix Goncourt



In this strange, elegant novel, winner of France's premier literary prize, Patrick Modiano portrays a man in pursuit of the identity he lost in the murky days of the Paris Occupation, the black hole of French memory.



For ten years Guy Roland has lived without a past. His current life and name were given to him by his recently retired boss, Hutte, who welcomed him, a onetime client, into his detective agency. Guy makes full use of Hutte's files - directories, yearbooks, and papers of all kinds going back half a century - but his leads are few. Could he really be the person in that photograph, a young man remembered by some as a South American attaché? Or was he someone else, perhaps the disappeared scion of a prominent local family? He interviews strangers and is tantalized by half-clues until, at last, he grasps a thread that leads him through the maze of his own repressed experience.



On one level Missing Person is a detective thriller, a 1950s film noir mix of smoky cafés, illegal passports, and insubstantial figures crossing bridges in the fog. On another level, it is also a haunting meditation on the nature of the self. Modiano's sparce, hypnotic prose, superbly translated by Daniel Weissbort, draws his readers into the intoxication of a rare literary experience. (Verba Mundi)

• Dora Bruder
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• In the Café of Lost Youth (New York Review Books Classics)
• Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)
• Sundays in August (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)
• Out of the Dark ( Du Plus Loin De L'Oubli )
• Pedigree: A Memoir (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)
• After the Circus: A Novel (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)
• Villa Triste
• Honeymoon