When I realised that my French was good enough to stop reading Agatha Christie in translation and move on to more serious books, one of the first authors I turned to was Patrick Modiano. A friend had given me La Place de l'Etoile, which frankly I struggled with. But a few months later, in a second hand bookstore, I found Rue des boutiques obscures. With such a title, and a fantastic cover illustrated by Pierre Le-Tan, I couldn't resist. And I've been spellbound ever since.
Modiano's characters are never fully formed. They are phantoms, drifting through a city - usually Paris - that seems unfixed, malleable, a chiaroscuro collage of reality, memory and fantasy. Melancholy cafés, secretive hotels, boulevards at the edge of night: I doubt that Modiano would use the word, but I find his vision of the city deeply romantic. It is also reliable: each book circles around the same obsessions. Often, you wonder if you're reading the same book twice. The title Dans le café de la jeunesse perdue borders on self-parody. These days, I find that I don't need to read Modiano in order to step into his world. I just need to find myself in an unfamiliar quartier of Paris, at dusk on a Sunday. A silence falls, there is nobody around. The lights of a café beckon from a street corner. I don't know this place. Yet surely I've been here before.
