In het café van de verloren jeugd

Melancholy and the infinite drift

This novel has such a strong sense of mood. It post war Paris on the off beaten streets in not so bohemian cafes. People drifting looking for fixed points and avoiding black holes. It’s also a memory and belonging.

This novella has four chapters with four different first person narrators like The Sound and the Fury. Unlike that Faulkner novel, each of these characters have clarity and elegant prose. They are all interesting yet vague and drifting.

It really leaves the reader in a mood.

A charming book. As an english reader trying to learn french I will have certainly missed some of the subtleties, but I found it very helpful with a clear, unpretentious style. Highly evocative, more a painting in words than a story, with much background detail implied rather than stated. I will certainly be reading more Patrick Modiano