So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighbourhood
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- 39,00 kr
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- 39,00 kr
Utgivarens beskrivning
Jean Daragane, writer and recluse, has purposely built a life of seclusion away from the Parisian bustle. He doesn't see many people, he rarely goes out: he spends his life in a solitary world of his own making.
His peace is shattered however, one hot September afternoon, by a threatening phone call from a complete stranger, who claims to have found Daragane's old phone book and wants to question him about a particular name it contains. But when Daragane agrees to meet the mysterious Gilles Ottolini, he realises that - try as he might - he cannot place the name "Guy Torstel" at all. Yet Ottolini is desperate for any information on this man...
Finding himself suddenly entangled in the lives of Ottolini and his beautiful, but fragile young associate, Daragane is drawn into the mystery of a decades-old murder that will drag him out of his lonely apartment and force him to confront the memory of a long-suppressed personal trauma.
Imbued with nostalgia, subtlety, and its own unique poetry, this darkly mysterious novel weaves a spell that provokes as much as it entrances.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A quietly haunting search for the truth or at least for the facts of a postwar French childhood, Nobel-winner Modiano's novel spins out over a summer in which "everything is uncertain." The quest begins with a phone call: elderly, isolated writer Jean Daragane has lost his address book on a train, and a man named Gilles Ottolini has found it. Ottolini offers to return the book, but when the two meet in a Paris cafe, he demands information about one of the people listed: Guy Torstel, whose name also appears in one of Jean's early novels, Le Noir de l' t (The Black of Summer). Although he cannot immediately remember Torstel and is reluctant to engage with the outside world ("in his solitude, he had never felt so light-hearted"), Jean nevertheless finds himself reading through a dossier about a 1951 murder case, given to him by Gilles's girlfriend, Chantal Grippay, and encountering in these papers names that were once familiar to him, including Torstel. Modiano's text rewards the patient reader as this time-hopping account of coincidences, uncertainties, and echoes of a half-forgotten history unfolds, "the present and the past merge together," building toward a powerful, memorable conclusion.
