Honeymoon

September 15, 1993
$19.95. F A winner of France's prestigious Prix Goncourt, Modiano is the author of 17 novels as well as the screenplay for Louis Malle's noteworthy film, Lacombe Lucien. In this slight but probing novel, a middle-aged man decides to take a "honeymoon." Scheduled to fly to Brazil on a job, documentary filmmaker Jean B. instead slips away to Milan and then returns to a Parisian suburb. There he attempts to trace the life and death (by suicide) of a woman named Ingrid, whom he met while hitchhiking to Saint-Tropez. World War II is raging, and Ingrid, who is traveling with her husband, clearly has something to hide. Ingrid's mystery is not rewardingly played out, but Modiano is a wonderfully evocative writer--there's a nice touch of menace throughout, and the cool, collected writing feels like a salve. For literary collections.-- Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"

Copyright 1993 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 1993
In the latest work of French novelist Modiano, the narrator, Jean Bo, is a middle-aged maker of documentary films who has traveled the world. The day arrives--as he knew it would--when his globe-trotting life with his wife loses all meaning, and Jean seeks anonymity in the suburbs of Paris. There he passes time alone and in silence, slipping easily between the past and the present. And in avoiding the future, Jean tries to determine exactly when it was that summer lost its lightness and began to give him a "sense of emptiness and absence." His reverie, which is the novel, consists mostly of composing a mental obituary for a woman he met 20 years earlier, during World War II. Her tale, revealed carefully over the length of the narrative, is a beautiful example of Modiano's fluid storytelling and his ability to move seamlessly between Paris and the Cote d'Azur, childhood and adulthood, peacetime and wartime. ((Reviewed Dec. 1, 1993))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1993, American Library Association.)