In the Café of Lost Youth (New York Review Books Classics)

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A street, a book, a Café - all are pretexts that Louki uses in her struggle with life, with the meaning or with its lack, even. Four narrators, a student from a cafe, a private detective hired by an aggrieved husband, the heroine herself and one of her lovers, construct a portrait of Jacqueline Delanque, otherwise known as Louki. He currently teaches French and is translating a novel by Pierre Mac Orlan, which will be published in 2016. They have interesting nicknames such as "the Jaguar", "the Captain", "Crossbones", and of course Louki. The story starts with the narration of a young engineering student who is trying to fit in with the artsy crowd at Condé.

This novella is written in four chapters, each from the first person point of view of four different characters, all of whom have a connection to a 22 year old young woman known as Louki, a name given to her in a baptism or second birth by someone known as Tarzan, or was it Zacharias? In particular, Modiano was fascinated by van der Elsken’s photographs of the circle of Guy Debord, whom he renames Guy de Vere. Pour Nietzsche, c’est une all��gorie aux connotations morales, un choix hypothétique que la mort nous offrirait entre le néant et la répétition perpétuelle et détaillée de notre vie.The book has been written in a lyrical daze, and the characters are varied but seem to be suffering from a certain mass malady - which captivates the reader as if the sci-fi is happening for real. 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. Someone in the Conde tried to keep track for a few years of all the people who came into the café, day and night, and one of the narrators has his hands on that record; it includes names, dates, times, which people sat where and when. Quant à Louki, le narrateur héros, elle ne fait que nous offrir quelques détails de son enfance, peut-être pour justifier son besoin perpétuel d’évasion (« Je n’étais vraiment moi-même qu’à l’instant où je m’enfuyais. Le premier, un élève à L’École des mines, joue le rôle du narrateur témoin, très peu impliqué dans le déroulement des événements, qui lui ont laissé quelque souvenir nostalgique d’une femme mystérieuse, dont il connaît seulement le surnom avec lequel elle a été baptisée un jour dans le café Le Condé qu’il fréquentait dans sa jeunesse.

People disappear one day and we notice that we knew nothing abut them, not even their real identity, says Roland but it could be the epitaph of any Modiano novel. In The Café of Lost Youth is maybe my fifth book by 2014 Nobel winner and Parisian Patrick Modiano, evoking a time in Paris in the fifties, a time of young people in cafes. Interesting, Tony… I’ve read a couple of his books and they seemed very much of a muchness, and I wasn’t entirely convinced by his vagueness. Step by step though, the author guided me from the tourist view to the disturbing, sad inner landscape of people living at the edge of society – misfits, bohemians, loners – a group of mostly young people who meet at the 'Conde' more to hide from the world than to plan to take it by storm.The central human character is the young, lost soul of Jacqueline Delanque, nicknamed “Louki” by the cast of regulars at the tacky Café Condé she wanders into one day. For him these are areas in Paris where one is nowhere specific, between a particular district and its neighbour, a no man’s land (he uses the English term in the French text) where one is not tied to a specific neighbourhood.

I have seen all the characters who might have lost their youth, and those clinging hard to what´s left of it. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.En el cafè de la joventut perduda” explora la idea d’un punt de trobada per aquells que deambulen les “zones neutrals” d’una ciutat on el passat, el present i el futur es donen la mà d’una manera inquietant. In another sense, though, this ‘lost youth’ refers less to the people than to the idea, the concept of time gone for good. Louki is one of the narrators, recounting chapters of her past with a certain vagueness that continues the foggy train of thought of the novel.

A young woman who one day appears out of nowhere, quickly becoming a regular, she is to become the focal point of the novel, a woman of mystery whom the young narrator can’t help but be fascinated by. She drifts into a brief, doomed marriage with Jean-Pierre Choureau, director of a real estate agency. Both Louki and the PI are rootless with no moorings and, it’s as if their concern for landmarks and neighborhoods of Paris substitute as a way of grounding themselves in something. I am usually not one for the minimal, Hemingway-esque style of writing, but it seemed to fit well here. The theme of extinction comes here only in response to a self-flight, the permanent flight of the one who hides from himself.The third chapter is narrated by Louki, and she paints a very different picture of the events that we have witnessed so far. including Louki herself, while Modiano explores the themes of identity, memory, and forgetting that are at the heart of his work: To try to reclaim the past though memory and exploration, always falling short of that hopeless goal of retrieval. Jean Patrick Modiano (French pronunciation: ​[ʒɑ̃ paˈtʁik ˌmɔdjaˈno]; born 30 July 1945) is a French novelist and recipient of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature. The writing invited me to wonder about a young woman, new to the Bohemian mix inside a mid-20th-century, Parisian café. De Vere also gives her a copy of Louise, Sister of the Void, and Louki crosses out the name Louise and replaces it with her own real name, Jacqueline, on the cover of the book.