Kirkus Review
In his fourth novel, first published in 1975, Nobel Prize-winning French writer Modiano develops his now-trademark demimonde of secrets kept and personae doffed and donned. The time is 1960, the setting a small resort town alongside an alpine lake somewhere within easy distance of the Franco-Swiss border. Hovering on the horizon is the dark cloud of the Algerian War. An 18-year-old boy has come to that town from Paris: "A disagreeable, police-heavy atmosphere prevailed there. Far too many roundups for my taste. Exploding bombs." The choice of venue is deliberate, for in this little town the protagonist can idle the days away without drawing any unnecessary attentionand if attention does center on him, he can slip away across the lake. "I didn't yet know," he says meaningfully, "that Switzerland doesn't exist." Given to gloom and panic, he takes on an improbable pseudonym but keeps to himself, walling himself off in the mountains. Yetwell, cherchez la femme, and la femme will turn up, this time in the form of the beautiful Yvonne Jacquet, who lives a luxurious life of villas, Great Danes, and sports cars between film auditions. "You understand, she's here incognito," hisses her companion, a so-called doctor elegant of scarf and cigaretteand a man who himself has a lot to hide. (He often boasts that he has practiced medicine in Switzerland, at which our protagonist thinks, "each time I felt like asking him, What kind of medicine?' ") One theory of hiding successfully, the reader supposes, might be to surround oneself with people with even greater reasons to keep a low profile, but for all that, these people live as if their lives depended on being recognizedtypically mysterious Modiano behavior, in other words, with shades of Giorgio Bassani and Graham Greene. Not much happens in these elegantly written pages, but the atmospherics are perfect: a brilliant evocation of place, memory, and loss, shot through with an aching nostalgia. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Beautifully translated by Cullen, this is more substantial and satisfying than much of what has appeared thus far from Nobel laureate Modiano (After the Circus, 2015). Its length allows a picture to develop not just of the three main characters but also of a brittle community of small-time resort celebrities, of hangers-on with nothing to hang on to. Young lovers Yvonne and the narrator, Victor, a swindler pretending to be a Russian count, while away their days in a hotel and spend their evenings in the company of René, a doctor who crosses the lake from France to his mysterious practice in Geneva. In the 1960s, with the Algerian War in the news, Victor feels that time has stopped here, in the Haute-Savoie. Spending the occasional night at René's Villa Triste, he and Yvonne sink to this: We'd start at opposite ends of the house and crawl toward each other in the dark. Victor realizes that he never believed his own lies, and never knew the truth about his own life or other lives spent without being lived.--Autrey, Michael Copyright 2016 Booklist
Library Journal Review
An elliptical narrative with a submerged past and memory shifting like smoke, this story has all the hallmarks of Nobel Prize winner Modiano's writing. But with more details forthrightly given and a franker sense of the erotic, it is refreshingly different, too. In the early Sixties, a restless young man who calls himself Count Victor Chmara hides out in a fashionable French resort town on a lake near Switzerland. What he's hiding from remains uncertain, though brief reference is made to the ongoing Algerian War and shadowy events in prewar Berlin. Soon he's linked up with aspiring actress Yvonne Jacquet and Dr. René Meinthe, an older friend of hers whose sexual proclivities briefly touch the narrative's surface. This mysteriously wealthy twosome invites the young man to leave his dowdy boardinghouse and move into their elegant abode, and he pursues an increasingly heated affair with Yvonne. Suddenly, it all falls away, and our young hero is left with questions while remaining a question mark himself. VERDICT Adding more color to Modiano's exquisite palette; highly recommended. © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
