In the Café of Lost Youth

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The alleged photographer is next up as narrator and we learn that he is not a photographer. The final two narrators are Louki herself and, finally, Roland, who becomes her boyfriend.

Where did Louki come from? What was her past like? What is with this enigma surrounding her? It appears that no one really knows. In particular, Modiano was fascinated by van der Elsken’s photographs of the circle of Guy Debord, whom he renames Guy de Vere. Debord was a French Marxist thinker in Paris at that time, who taught classes/held meetings in various places around the city. Louki, who had said she was a college student but was really not, was impressed by de Vere, and attended some of his meetings, read some of his work and the work he suggested she read. Like W.G. Sebald, another European writer haunted by memory and by the history that took place just before he was born, Modiano combines a detective's curiosity with an elegist's melancholy."--Adam Kirsch, The New RepublicThe young people may or may not be students – they drink too much even for students. The motherly café owner thinks of them as stray dogs and muses “things will turn out badly for them.” One of the older men says “I didn’t have high hopes for their futures.” There are four narrators (a student in a cafe, a private detective hired by a husband, the main protagonist herself and one of her lovers) and they take a section each in such a way that the whole novel builds a picture of Jacqueline Delanque (aka Louki). Building you own picture of Louki is perhaps one of the key elements of the story so I won’t include any details here. But Eternal Recurrence is a repeating phrase and several sci-fi books put in multiple appearances. Modiano’s latest novel to be published in English is In the Café of Lost Youth ( New York Review Books), first published in France by Gallimard in 2007. Like most of his novels, In the Café of Lost Youth is short enough to be read in one sitting, and that is exactly how one should read this book, preferably while sitting in the café of one’s choice. In the Café of Lost Youth hovers around the enigmatic young woman known as “Louki,” who wanders in and out of the lives of the novel’s various narrators. When we first encounter Louki we are told that there is nothing habitual about her. In fact, she haunts the narrative like a ghost or an ill-formed presence waiting to join the action, but for whatever reason, is not able to fully engage the other characters. “She wasn’t regular about her visits. You might find her sitting there very early in the morning. Or sometimes she appeared at midnight and stayed until closing time.”

All this rush of the Self to the world, and then against it, of the Self to the unrealizable desire, of the tragedy of awareness of the human condition, have a charm which only life has, and which Modiano captures in an absolutely authentic prose. Modiano has mentioned on Oct 9, 2014, during an interview with La Grande Librairie, that one of the books which had a great impact on his writing life was 'Le cœur est un chasseur solitaire' (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter), the first novel published by Carson McCullers in 1940.Louki's portrait is sketched by four narrators, each of them in his or her own way a drifter through life who seeks refuge among the friendly and slightly decadent atmosphere of a bar at night. First there is a student at the nearby Sorbonne, then a private investigator hired by the woman's abandoned husband, followed by Louki herself and concluded by an artist companion. In the Café of Lost Youth is an atmospheric exploration of people drifting through, and eventually out of, time. Time and memory are veils through which Modiano’s narrators attempt to capture, or recapture, something impossible to hold: the ghosts of the past and paths never followed. Though the narrators do not intend this — they’re genuinely searching for something lost — their stories read like elegies. Louki is in fact alive. In body. But her soul is endlessly unstill. Whether she's "here, there or elsewhere. In (her) beginning." In the Café of Lost Youth is presented in four parts, each with a different narrator: the second part is recounted by Caisley, who is charged by Louki's husband -- she turns out to be married -- to look into her disappearance, as she had left him two months earlier, "after an unspectacular argument"; it's this search that leads Caisley to the Condé. Modiano's parents met in occupied Paris during World War II and began a clandestine relationship. Modiano's childhood took place in a unique atmosphere: with an absent father -- of which he heard troubled stories of dealings with the Vichy regime -- and a Flemish-actress mother who frequently toured. His younger brother's sudden death also greatly influenced his writings.

Rolands/Modianos Chanson triste gilt dem alten Paris, der verlorenen Kindheit, der vergeudeten Jugend, der toten Geliebten Louki. Doch der Zeitfluss lässt sich nicht aufhalten: Nietzsches grosser Mittag und die ewige Wiederkehr bleiben Illusion. Unsterblich ist nur die Kunst." - Ingeborg Waldinger, Neue Zürcher Zeitung In the Café of Lost Youth -- the title taken from a perfect Guy Debord-epigraph to the book -- begins in typical Modiano-fashion, an air of nostalgia as Modiano describes a slightly murky 1960s past with characters who are hard to get a fix on. And whereas Bowing tries to create 'fixed points' for reference -- "it's almost like a police register or a precinct logbook", one person observes -- Roland had tried to write a text in those days called On Neutral Zones, trying to chart: In the case of the student, he seems more concerned about hiding the fact that he is still a student, at the nearby École Supérieure des Mines.En el café de la juventud perdida pretende retratar a una cierta generación de jóvenes en el París de los años sesenta. Para ello, toma como punto de referencia un cierto café Condé donde se reunían una serie de bohemios, la mayoría veinteañeros y algunos adultos que se mezclaban bien con esos jóvenes. Todos tienen en común un afán de vivir y beber el presente. Además del alcohol, algunos consumen drogas. Paris, 1950s. We're inside a café called Condé. Bohemian youth and some older men form the crowd of this Condé, where our central character walks in. She's a young lady, mysterious, elegant and awkwardly quiet in her ways. The regulars at the café call her Louki, but no one apparently knows her real name. There is a sense of sadness as I begin to write my review of this book. Sadness because the book is about someone or something lost; the titular youth or the selves each of the four narrators has left behind. But also sadness because nothing is crystal clear, there is no certainty or redemption anywhere.