Missing person / Patrick Modiano ; translated from the French by Daniel Weissbort.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Modiano, Patrick, 1945-

Contributor:

Gotham Book Mart Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Weissbort, Daniel.

Series:

Verba Mundi

A Verba Mundi book

Standardized Title:

Rue des boutiques obscures. English

Language:

English

French

Genre:

Fiction.

Penn Provenance:

Gotham Book Mart (former owner) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copy)

Physical Description:

167 pages ; 21 cm.

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Boston : David R. Godine, 2005.

Summary:

For ten years Guy Roland has lived without a past. His current life and name were given to him by his recently retired boss, Hutte, who welcomed him, a onetime client, into his detective agency. Guy makes full use of Hutte's files - directories, yearbooks, and papers of all kinds going back half a century - but his leads are few. Could he really be the person in that photograph, a young man remembered by some as a South American attach? Or was he someone else, perhaps the disappeared scion of a prominent local family? He interviews strangers and is tantalized by half-clues until, at last, he grasps a thread that leads him through the maze of his own repressed experience. On one level Missing Person is a detective thriller, a 1950s film noir mix of smoky cafs, illegal passports, and insubstantial figures crossing bridges in the fog. On another level, it is also a haunting meditation on the nature of the self. Modiano's sparce, hypnotic prose, superbly translated by Daniel Weissbort, draws his readers into the intoxication of a rare literary experience.

Notes:

Originally published: Great Britain, 1980.

ISBN:

1567922813

OCLC:

56387069