In the Café of Lost Youth (New York Review Books Classics)

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Our lives flicker past us like the afterimage of a photo; eventually, our attempts at constancy must fall away. He previously won the 2012 Austrian State Prize for European Literature, the 2010 Prix mondial Cino Del Duca from the Institut de France for lifetime achievement, the 1978 Prix Goncourt for Rue des boutiques obscures , and the 1972 Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française for Les Boulevards de ceinture . The tapestry crocheted by the author is bright and sharp, and few details catch the mind's eye and linger long after the reader has moved away from the wall it is displayed on. I lost track of my self, and unhappily - facing the world, head on - eventually recovered it in the wrong way.

including Louki herself, while Modiano explores the themes of identity, memory, and forgetting that are at the heart of his work: To try to reclaim the past though memory and exploration, always falling short of that hopeless goal of retrieval. I've read countless favorable reviews about Modiano, but I don't realize how it has always escaped me. Central to the novel is the circle run by the now canonical philosopher Guy Debord, whose double in this novel is himself obsessed by the escapist novel Lost Horizons. Louki is the mysterious woman, whose name most of the others do not seem to know, though we soon find it out.One of the ideas is that in the confusion of a large city, everyone needs to find a few "fixed points" to hold on to, such as a favorite cafe. Here the phrase is used to describe the ne’er-do-wells that frequent the café, shady characters who have wasted their tender years. A mysterious young woman, who they nickname Louki, sometimes sits with them but doesn't usually participate in the conversations. He has written more than thirty works of fiction, including novels, children's books, and the screenplay for Louis Malle's film Lacombe, Lucien . The third chapter is narrated by Louki, and she paints a very different picture of the events that we have witnessed so far.

In another sense, though, this ‘lost youth’ refers less to the people than to the idea, the concept of time gone for good. The title of this book, with a reference to a 'lost youth', immediately arouses a sense of melancholy that is the trademark of Modiano. Louki reveals his sufferings without any trace of pathos, all her night escapes having a single purpose : that of not being alone in the darkness that dominated the room in which she lived.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. Her mother, a dancer at Moulin Rouge, leaves her daughter home alone each night until the wee hours of the morning. Gradually she explores further afield, bumping into the drug world through a chance meeting with Jeanette Gaul, known ominously as “Death’s Head”. The writing invited me to wonder about a young woman, new to the Bohemian mix inside a mid-20th-century, Parisian café.