In this strange, elegant novel, 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 one-time 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 leads to his former life are few. Could he really be that person in a 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 a 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 spare, hypnotic prose, superbly translated by Daniel Weissbort, draws listeners into the intoxication of a rare literary experience.
About the Author :
Patrick Modiano is a bestselling novelist and the winner of some of the most prestigious literary awards in France, including the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Mondial Cino Del Duca for lifetime achievement. In 2014 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for "the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation."
Bronson Pinchot, Audible's Narrator of the Year for 2010, has won Publishers Weekly Listen-Up Awards, AudioFile Earphones Awards, Audible's Book of the Year Award, and Audie Awards for several audiobooks, including Matterhorn, Wise Blood, Occupied City, and The Learners. A magna cum laude graduate of Yale, he is an Emmy- and People's Choice-nominated veteran of movies, television, and Broadway and West End shows. His performance of Malvolio in Twelfth Night was named the highlight of the entire two-year Kennedy Center Shakespeare Festival by the Washington Post. He attended the acting programs at Shakespeare & Company and Circle-in-the-Square, logged in well over 200 episodes of television, starred or costarred in a bouquet of films, plays, musicals, and Shakespeare on Broadway and in London, and developed a passion for Greek revival architecture.
Review :
"[An] elliptical, engrossing rumination on the essence of identity and the search for self."
-- "Booklist"
"Beautifully written and perfectly noirish, as though the world were being seen through a haze of Gauloise smoke. Be warned, though: after reading this, a sensitive soul may well seize up the next time a stranger waves."
-- "Kirkus Reviews (starred reviews)"
"Delicate and cunning...Modiano's method is to sidle up to subjects of mystery and horror, indicating them without broaching them, as if gingerly fingering the outside of a poison bottle...He opens dark doors into the past out of a sunlit present."
-- "Times Literary Supplement"
"Moody, atmospheric, and dreamlike, this novel follows conventions of both noir fiction and ghost stories but can be read on many levels."
-- "Library Journal"
"The best place to fling oneself into Mr. Modiano's oeuvre."
-- "New York Times"
