Missing Person – November 30, 2004

Missing Person (Verba Mundi) (Verba Mundi Book) Paperback – November 30, 2004

Author: Visit Amazon’s Patrick Modiano Page | ISBN: 1567922813

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Missing Person – November 30, 2004

Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for Missing Person Verba Mundi Verba Mundi Book at Amazon com Read honest and unbiased product reviews from our Release Date November 30 2004 Book 1 Paperback by Tielle St Clare Author Missing Person Verba Mundi Paperback Release Date November 30 2004 Frozen Little Golden Book Missing Person Verba Mundi Paperback Daniel Weissbort Author

• Series: Verba Mundi Book


• Paperback: 168 pages


• Publisher: David R Godine (November 30, 2004)


• Language: English


• ISBN-10: 1567922813


• ISBN-13: 978-1567922813


• Product Dimensions: 0.5 x 5.5 x 8 inches


• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)


• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #752 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

I read this book on my Kindle in the French version (French is my mother tongue) as I bought it for my 100 year old mother who still reads one novel a week on her Kindle. She wanted to read this book as soon as she heard he had won the Nobel, this is a book that came out in 1978, the year Patrick Modiano won the Goncourt, a prestigious French prize. Before bringing it over to her, I read it, immediately taken in by the opening lines, unable to put it down. As I am now writing this critique, I just learned from an article in the Washington Post, that "Missing Person" is the book Peter Englund, a historian and the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, recommends to readers unfamiliar with Patrick Modiano. “It’s a fun book,” Englund said. “He’s playing with the genre.” And the genre he is playing with is mysteries. A detective, suffering from amnesia, sets out to recover his identity, following a variety of strange leads.

I’d like to recall here a very astute comment made sometime back by Anne Korkokeakivi, writing for THE MILLIONS, where she noted that French novels tend to be "… dark, searching, philosophical, autobiographical, self-reflective, and/or poetic (without being overwritten)."

Patrick Modiano’s "Missing Person" precisely fits this description. It is all these things, dark, searching, self-reflective and yes, poetic.

Consider the first lines: "I am nothing. Nothing but a pale shape, silhouetted that evening against the café terrace, waiting for the rain to stop; the shower had started when Hutte left me."

Amazing, isn’t it? The opening sentence is just three words, but how they resound. I am nothing. That is of course the whole theme of the book.

“I am nothing”* — the opening phrase of this 1978 novel which won the Prix Goncourt for Patrick Modiano, now the most recent winner of the Nobel Prize. The protagonist is a private detective named Guy Roland. Only this is merely the name given to him by Hutte, his former employer at the detective agency when he rescued him from total amnesia a dozen years before, and gave him a job. Now Hutte is retiring to Nice, leaving Guy with only one case to investigate: his own.

Yes, it is a totally implausible concept, but Modiano is less interested in the mechanism of Guy’s search for self than in what that search will reveal. The detective will follow a number of clues, each time finding somebody who will give him a tiny part of his story, but not the whole of it. The story is implausible too in that Guy gets almost none of the “Why bother me?” kinds of reaction that one might expect. Almost all his informants seem glad to talk with him; they invite him to their homes and give him boxes of souvenirs to go away with. This, even as Guy himself is having to pose as someone else to gain their confidence, trying on one possible role after another, as he gradually works out who he must be. And, as he does so, he begins to have flashes of memory of his own.

Artificial though the mechanism may be, there is none of the surrealism that one associates with many mid-century French writers. Modiano copies the “policier” style perfectly; his noir settings and vivid dialogue could come from the pen of Simenon or any of his followers. “The lights in the bar dimmed, as they do in some dance-halls at the beginning of a slow fox.

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