In the Caf of Lost Youth [Paperback]

NYRB Classics Original
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

In the Café of Lost Youthis vintage Patrick Modiano, an absorbing evocation of a particular Paris of the 1950s, shadowy and shady, a secret world of writers, criminals, drinkers, and drifters. The novel, inspired in part by the circle (depicted in the photographs of Ed van der Elsken) of the notorious and charismatic Guy Debord, centers on the enigmatic, waiflike figure of Louki, who catches everyone’s attention even as she eludes possession or comprehension. Through the eyes of four very different narrators, including Louki herself, we contemplate her character and her fate, while Modiano explores the themes of identity, memory, time, and forgetting that are at the heart of his spellbinding and deeply moving art.“[M]odiano at his height. In 1950s Paris, a young woman nicknamed Louki haunts a café called the Condé, casting a decided allure yet remaining mysterious and unknowable. A young hanger-on, the husband she abandoned, the detective searching for her—all try to grasp her and fail. Not unexpectedly, Modiano withholds her secret life to the end.” —Library Journal, starred review

“In the Café of Lost Youthis a kind of suspense story. It is a story about the many facets of a single woman but also, unquestionably, a story about the multiple worlds within Paris, a city that, as much as any individual human being, remains essentially unknowable. It casts a near hypnotic spell.” —Douglas Kennedy,L’Express

“Every area described is also imbued with layers of emotion. . . . Readers are left haunted by the cityscape Modiano paints.” —Henri Astier,The Times Literary Supplement 

“Modiano’s books develop a different tone, one more mellow and melancholic, somewhere between sepia and film noir, more akin to the photograplc