In the Cafe of Lost Youth by Patrick Modiano ;2007 - translated by Chris Clarke.2016 - A Paris in July 2024 Work

Paris in July 2024

 Paris in July does not just include books. Contributions on your Paris vacation, your favourite meal or restaurant, French movies, music, art, Paris history and more are very welcome

In the Cafe of Lost Youth by Patrick Modiano ;2007 - translated by Chris Clarke.2016 - A Paris in July 2024 Work

Patrick Modiano, winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize for literature and an internationally beloved novelist, has been honored with an array of prizes, including the 2010 Prix mondial Cino Del Duca by the Institut de France for lifetime achievement and the 2012 Austrian State Prize for European Literature. He lives in Paris. 

In the Cafe of Lost Youth is the sixth work by Patrick Modiano I have featured during a Paris in July event.

The Café of Lost Youth is vintage Patrick Modiano, an absorbing evocation of a particular Paris of the 1950s, shadowy and shady, a secret world of writers, criminals, drinkers, and drifters. 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. Through the eyes of four very different narrators, including Louki herself, we contemplate her character and her fate, while Modiano explores the themes of identity, memory, time, and forgetting that are at the heart of his spellbinding and deeply moving art. 

For those new to Modiano I suggest you start with his Occupation Trilogy set in Nazi controlled Paris.

In the Cafe of Lost Youth is a powerful account of being young and not so young in parts of Paris out of the affluent areas.  It features a book store as a central setting and has numerous wonderful literary references 

Mel Ulm

The Occupation Trilogy by Patrick Modiano

Paris in July Year - Year Ten - Hosted by Thyme for Tea

So far as my participation in Paris In July Year Ten I have read


1.  Colette- Two Early Short Stories
2. The Black Notebook by Patrick Modiano
3. "A Duel" by Guy de Maupassant ( A Franco-Prussian War Story)
4. Life, Death, and Betrayal at The Hotel Ritz in Paris by Tilar Mazzeo (non fiction)
5. How the French Invented Love by Marilyn Yolem (literary history)
6. "The Lost Child" by Francois Coppée
7. "The Juggler of Norte Dame" by Anatole France- no post
8. A Very French Christmas- A Collection of the Greatest Holiday Stories of France
9. "The Illustrious Gaudissart" by Honore de Balzac
10. After the Circus by Patrick Modiano
11. "Gaudissart II" by Honore de Balzac
12. 6:41 to Paris by Jean-Phillipe Blondel
13. "Noel" by Irene Nemirovsky
14. Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin


15. The Madeleine Project by Clara Beaudoux
16. Nais Micoulin by Emile Zola
17. The Occupation Trilogy by Patrick Modiano

La Place de l'Ėtiole 1968

The Night Watch 1969

Ring Roads 1972

I have now read five novels by Patrick Modiano (born Boulangne-Billancourt, France, 1945).  He is a prolific writer and I hope to read more of his work.  His The Black Notebook and After the Circus are very good novels focusing on the search for hidden history and for identity.  The Occupation Trilogy is a work of a much higher order, a sublimely brilliant almost surreal recreation of what it was like to be a French Jew during the occupation of Paris by the Nazis.  I am currently reading a very well done history, Paris at War-1939 to 1944 by Donald Drake, which helps me understand what it was like in Paris during the war years.  Many Parisians were convinced the Germans would win, there was a strong element of anti-Jewish feeling, underlying this was a growing resistance as the war went on and the German Occupation began harsher and the prevailing mood was shifting to the idea that the allies could win.

Modiano was 22 when La Place de l'Ėtiole was published.  I found it an incredibly powerful work, deeply evocative of French literature, Proust is clearly a great influence on this work and he is attacked by the Germans and French collaborators as the epitome of "degenerate literature".  This work has a strongly hallucinatory quality.  Paris became a kind of play pen for the worst of German officers.  The French were drawn between self preservation and patriotism.  There is strong sexual content in La Place de l'Ėtiole.  I read this work last year intending to post on it for Paris in July in 2016 but I was too overwhelmed by the power of this book.

The Night Watch focuses on a young man working for the French Gestapo and simultaneously informing on the French police to the resistance.  We see him torn apart by the forces working on him

Ring Road focuses on a young man looking in war time Paris for his father, a French Jew missing for ten years.  He finds him amidst spies, anti-Semites, and prostitutes.

Prostitutes play a big part in the Occupation Trilogy, a metaphor for how Paris survived.  There are lots of wonderful literary references.

The Occupation Trilogy is, to me, must Reading.  Modiano carries on the great tradition of French literature.

Mel u

After the Circus by Patrick Modiano (2015 in translation)

So far as my participation in Paris In July Year Ten I have read


1.  Colette- Two Early Short Stories
2. The Black Notebook by Patrick Modiano
3. "A Duel" by Guy de Maupassant ( A Franco-Prussian War Story)
4. Life, Death, and Betrayal at The Hotel Ritz in Paris by Tilar Mazzeo (non fiction)
5. How the French Invented Love by Marilyn Yolem (literary history)
6. "The Lost Child" by Francois Coppée
7. "The Juggler of Norte Dame" by Anatole France- no post
8. A Very French Christmas- A Collection of the Greatest Holiday Stories of France
9. "The Illustrious Gaudissart" by Honore de Balzac
10. After the Circus by Patrick Modiano

From Yale University Press Website

One of the hallmarks of French author Patrick Modiano’s writing is a singular ability to revisit particular motifs and episodes, infusing each telling with new detail and emotional nuance. In this evocative novel the internationally acclaimed author takes up one of his most compelling themes: a love affair with a woman who disappears, and a narrator grappling with the mystery of a relationship stopped short.

Set in mid-sixties Paris, After the Circus traces the relationship between the narrator, a young man not quite of legal age, and the slightly older, enigmatic woman he first glimpses at a police interrogation. The two lovers make their uncertain way into each other’s hearts, but the narrator soon finds himself in the unsettling, ominous presence of others. Who are these people? Are they real, or simply evoked? Part romance, part detective story, this mesmerizing book fully demonstrates Modiano’s signature use of atmosphere and suggestion as he investigates the perils and the exhilaration of young love.

Patrick Modiano, winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize for literature and an internationally beloved novelist, has been honored with an array of prizes, including the 2010 Prix mondial Cino Del Duca by the Institut de France for lifetime achievement and the 2012 Austrian State Prize for European Literature. He lives in Paris. Mark Polizzotti has translated more than forty books from the French and is director of the publications program at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

I am slightly under the weather so I will just make use of Yale University Press data.  Of this book and The Black Notebook, I prefer The Black Notebook.

I was given this book by the publisher.

It is for sale as a digital book on Amazon for $16.00, way in excess of a fair prize.

La Place de Létoile by Patrick Modiano (1968, part one of The Occupation Trilogy, translated by Frank Wynne)

Patrick Modiano's (born 1945, France, Nobel Prize 2014) fiction on the Nazi occupation of Paris moved the Nobel Prize Committee to award him the the Nobel Prize in 2014.  The Occupation Trilogy is not a three part work, it is simply three novellas set in Paris during World War Two published in one book.  (I have read and posted on Iréne Némirovsky's fiction set in France  during the early part of this period.)  My first venture into the oevere of Modiano was in his After the Circus, a very interesting work.  La Place de Létoile is much better.  

An appreciation of La Place de Létoile  would be enhanced if one had a good working knowledge of the history of French literature.  The narrator presents and views himself as a man of great culture.  After reading the work I read a few online reviews.  I found the review in The Telegraph for sure far exceeded my ability to give a brief account of the very great depth of this work so I shall share it

As I read this I as brought to mind Coco Chanel living in the Ritz Hotel in Paris, fawning over Gestapo Officers.  The work also brought up the themes in Memoirs of an Anti-Semite by Gregor Von Rezzori

Behind both of these wonderful works of art is the exposure of the war on the Jews as a war on the reading life.  Much of the great literature that defined the mental world of the narrator of Le Place de Létoile was written by Jews.  Exaggerated sexuality plays out in these works as a compensation for the deep partially hidden from the narrators lack of self determination brought about by their anti-Semetism and their capitulation to the barbaric ideology of the Nazis.   Anti-Semitism was very much embedded in French society long before the occupation.  Many French citizens welcomed the removal of French Jews.  

I will reread this book for sure.  I hope soon to read the other two works in The Occupation Trilogy.

          1969 versus 2014.

After the Circus by Patrick Modiano (2015)

If there is a world capital of The Reading Life World it is Paris- Ambrosia Boussweau 

After the Circus  is my first encounter with the work of Patrick Modiano, the 2014 Nobel Prize Winner in Literature.  Paris is the setting and the heart of this novel.  Set in the 1960s, it is structured as a man relaying his experiences of many years ago.  The story lines begins with him recalling his international by the Paris police, suspicious over persons he has allegedly been reported talking with.  He sees a young woman a bit older than he, he is eighteen at the time, being questioned.  

There are a lot of mysteries in After the Circus.  The man lives in an apartment with an older man, a friend of his father.  The father evidently had to leave Paris and currently lives in Switzerland.  We never learn why he had to leave.  The young man and the few years older woman form a relationship of sorts.  Who she really is and why the police were so interested in her are a great mystery. 

I think I most enjoyed the descriptions of the city, the elegant Parisians, the interesting little restaurants, and the minor characters who come and go.

I was given a review copy of this book.

I enjoyed After the Circus a lot and will be reading more of the author's work.

Ambrosia Boussweau  

Patrick Modiano, winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize for literature and an internationally beloved novelist, has been honored with an array of prizes, including the 2010 Prix mondial Cino Del Duca by the Institut de France for lifetime achievement and the 2012 Austrian State Prize for European Literature. He lives in Paris. Mark Polizzotti has translated more than forty books from the French and is director of the publications program at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. - from webpage of the publisher, Yale University Press