Paris Nocturne
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3.5 • 2 Ratings
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
Late at night, long ago, when I was about to turn twenty-one, I was crossing the Place des Pyramides on my way to the Concorde when a car appeared suddenly out of the darkness. At first I thought it had just brushed me, then I felt a sharp pain from my ankle to my knee…
In the opening scene of Paris Nocturne, the nameless narrator is hit by a car near Place des Pyramides. He and the woman driving the car are taken in a police van to the hospital. He’s sure he has met her somewhere. He is given ether, wakes up in a different hospital, and the woman, Jacqueline Beausergent, has vanished. A mysterious figure presents him with an account of the accident and hands him an envelope stuffed with bank notes.
Does Jacqueline Beausergent have the answers to the narrator’s questions about the past, about his father? He will comb the city’s cafes and stations to find her.
Paris Nocturne is like a mystery novel in which we are searching for the crime itself, as Modiano relentlessly explores the elusive nature of memory.
Born in Paris in 1945, Patrick Modiano has published over thirty novels, as well as the screenplay for Lacombe Lucien, and a number of children’s books. He has won many prizes, including the 2014 Nobel Prize.
‘Paris Nocturne is a discreet book, a perfect book.’ Libération
‘Paris Nocturne is cloaked in darkness, but it is a novel that is turned towards the light.’ L’Express
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Modiano was little known on the world stage until he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2014. This novel provides a superb and at 160 pages accessible entry to his writings. Its themes of memory and loss are emblematic of Modiano's oeuvre. The story begins "late at night, a long time ago" when, as a teenager, the narrator gets hit by a car driven by a mysterious woman, Jacqueline Beausergent, in a fur coat. She squeezes his wrist in the police van before the narrator succumbs to ether, administered by medical personnel. When he awakes, in a strange clinic, Jacqueline has vanished and the narrator is met by a large man whom he recalled hovering by the scene of the accident. The man hands him an envelope of cash, and when the narrator inquires about who Jacqueline is, he's told coldly that "as far as was concerned the case was closed.' " The narrator's search for Jacqueline propels the novel forward with the intensity of a noir. But Modiano is not writing mere pulp; the novel's true center is the past's pull, the way memories lay dormant for years only to explode "like a time bomb." The Proustian smell of ether, recollections of a father, passing through neighborhoods in Paris, even a stray dog in Modiano's hands, the fog of the past lingers on all the artifacts of daily life.
