In the Cafe of Lost Youth

How quickly the writer draws us into the world of this slender, gauzy novel.  Within a few pages I was mesmerized, in a kind of suspenseful trance.

Yet if someone had asked me what the book was about, I wouldn't have been able to answer. I was simply pulled along, masterful sentence by masterful sentence, hypnotized, into this vast no-mans-land, somewhere between dream and nightmare, lodged firmly both in the past and the future.  There is both a vein of nostalgia and prescience; this is the past, yes, of the lost youth, but also the future, of regrets and loss.

There is Paris, a character unto itself.  And there is Louki, the enigmatic, obscure object of longing, who flits through the pages and is lost, even to herself.  She unites the separate linked narratives: one by the young man who is convinced to drop out of school by his experiences at the cafe, one by the detective hired to find her, one by her last lover, and one even by herself.  There are little hints of lesbianism, of promiscuity, of petty crime and of flirtations with the occult, but they are ultimately not meaningful, simply details in the world that she navigates, lost and slightly bewildered, and above all unmoored and afraid.  This is not an existential crisis, this is not a portrait of modern alienation.  In my opinion it is only as simple, sad, and commonplace as the empty space which could have been filled by love.


The characters are always searching, torn between a desire for "fixed points" in the anonymity and constant flow of city life, and a desire for escape to "neutral spaces" that are located in certain neighborhoods but not of them.  They are often looking for specific street addresses but also for nameless hotels, for deep connections but also escape to fleeting encounters.

And occasionally they are happy.  Roland, who loves Louki, says:

I still had about two thousand francs left ....  We were rich.  The future was ours ....  We walked without any specific destination, we had the whole night ahead of us.... Where to?  We didn't know yet.... The places no longer mattered in the least, they had all blended together into one.  The lone goal of our journey was to go to the heart of summer, that place where time stops and the hands of the clock permanently show the same hour: twelve noon.

And later:

We reached the place de l'Eglise, in front of the Metro station.  And there, I can say it now that I no longer have anything to lose: I felt for the first time in my life, what the Eternal Return really was... .  It was just before we went down the steps into the Metro at Eglise-d'Auteiul.  Why there, of all places?  I haven't the slightest idea, and it doesn't matter anyway.  I stood still for a moment and I held her arm tightly.  We were there, together, in the same place, for all of eternity, and our stroll through Auteuil, we had already taken it during thousands and thousands of other lives.  No need to look at my watch.  I knew it was noon.

I had never really heard of Patrick Modiano and found that he recently won the Nobel.  I don't know what the rest of his stuff is like but I intend to find out.  When I am able.

4*
June 2020