A writer's notebook becomes the key that unlocks memories of a love formed and lost in 1960s Paris.
In the aftermath of Algeria's war of independence, Paris was a city rife with suspicion and barely suppressed violence. Amid this tension, Jean, a young writer adrift, met and fell for Dannie, an enigmatic woman fleeing a troubled past. Half a century later, with his old black notebook as a guide, Jean retraces this fateful period in his life, recounting how, through Dannie, he became mixed up with a group of unsavory characters connected by a shadowy crime. Soon Jean too was a person of interest to the detective pursuing their case--a detective who would prove instrumental in revealing Dannie's darkest secret.
The Black Notebook bears all the hallmarks of this Nobel Prize-winning literary master's unsettling and intensely atmospheric style, rendered in English by acclaimed translator Mark Polizzotti. Once again, Modiano invites us into his unique world, a Paris infused with melancholy, uncertain danger, and the fading echoes of lost love.
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."
Mark Polizzotti has translated numerous books from the French, including works by André Breton, Jean Echenoz, Marguerite Duras, and Gustave Flaubert. He is the author of Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton; a collection of poems, The New Life; and the collaborative novel S. He lives in Massachusetts.
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 :
"[A] magnificent novel that reawakens days long past, illuminating them with a dazzling light."
-- "Elle (France)"
"A short but potent novel that's as elegant as Claude Rains and as sinister as Peter Lorre...An atmospheric, smoky, sepia-toned whodunit."
-- "Kirkus Reviews"
"Bronson Pinchot elegantly narrates this mysterious novella. His fine French accent gives this brooding backward-glancing story by Nobel Prize winner Modiano a fine sense of time and place...Pinchot's nuanced narration of this brief work brings the listener into the complex past via Jean's black notebook...The energized Parisian street life of the 1960s is almost a character itself."
-- "AudioFile"
"Ex-convicts, missing bullets, a detective with a long memory...carefully wrought and superbly fluid."
-- "Le Monde (Paris)"
"In settings that seem to rise from the mists of the Seine, he explores the limits of memory and the slipperiness of both past and present."
-- "Library Journal (starred review)"
"Pure Modiano...It's the strange atmosphere between the lines that makes the magic."
-- "Le Figaro (Paris)"
"The prose--elliptical, muted, eloquent--falls on the reader like an enchantment...No one is currently writing such beautiful tales of loss, melancholy, and remembrance."
-- "Independent (London)"
"1960s Paris, a mysterious girl, a group of shady characters, danger...and sheer magic follows."
-- "Vogue"
