So You Don't Get Lost In The Neighborhood

Patrick Modiano

Sep 2015 · Sold by HarperCollins

About this ebook

“Modiano is an ideal writer to gorge on . . . A moody, delectable noir.” — The New Yorker

“The best kind of mystery, the kind that never stops haunting you.” — Entertainment Weekly

“A work of melancholic beauty . . . Sincere, shattering, magnificent.” — L’Express

In the stillness of his Paris apartment, Jean Daragane has built a life of total solitude. Then a surprising phone call shatters the silence of an unusually hot September, and the threatening voice on the other end of the line leaves Daragane wary but irresistibly curious. Almost at once, he finds himself entangled with a shady gambler and a beautiful, fragile young woman, who draw Daragane into the mystery of a decades-old murder. The investigation will force him to confront the memory of a trauma he had all but buried. This masterly novel penetrates the deepest enigmas of identity and compels us to ask whether we ever know who we truly are.

“Moody . . . Lyrical . . . A pleasure.” — Kirkus Reviews

“A writer unlike any other and a worthy recipient of the Nobel.” — Wall Street Journal

Ratings and reviews

As I noted in my review of Patrick Modiano's Suspended Sentences, I was drawn to his work after he won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature. I didn't like the novellas in Suspended Sentences, and his "suspense" novel So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood didn't help me understand the Nobel committee's decision any better (and I'm now scratching my head over this book's inclusion on the 2016 Tournament of Books Long List, too). I put the word "suspense" in quotation marks above because it is both accurate and inaccurate as a description of Modiano's novel. This is not a novel of suspense in the sense that I (and, I suspect, many other American readers) think of such novels. Alfred Hitchcock, often referred to as the "master of suspense," defined suspense as the state of waiting for something significant to happen, where the audience is as fully informed as possible and can, therefore, hold its breath waiting for that event to engulf the unsuspecting protagonist. In So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood, however, Modiano has reversed these roles; the protagonist, Jean Daragane, seems to know what's going on, but the reader is clueless. We can see from the start that Daragane feels threatened by the man who has somehow come into possession of his address book, but we have no idea why. My notes are peppered with such comments as "Why is he so wary from the beginning?" and "Seems unreasonably paranoid." That bewilderment is never resolved; the book ends abruptly 155 pages after it began, with nothing significant having happened (or, if it did, I missed it completely). If it weren't for my having read, understood, and enjoyed several books by Pascal Garnier (not to mention Marcel Proust, with whom Modiano has been compared), I would be tempted to conclude that works translated from the French are simply beyond me. Instead, I think Modiano's writing is simply too obscure for my tastes. I received a free copy of So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood through Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review.

About the author

PATRICK MODIANO was born in 1945 in a suburb of Paris and grew up in various locations throughout France. In 1967, he published his first novel, La Place de l'étoile, to great acclaim. Since then, he has published over twenty novels—including the Goncourt Prize−winning Rue des boutiques obscures (translated as Missing Person), Dora Bruder, and Les Boulevards des ceintures (translated as Ring Roads)—as well as the memoir Un Pedigree and a children's book, Catherine Certitude. He collaborated with Louis Malle on the screenplay for the film Lacombe Lucien. In 2014, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy cited “the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the Occupation,” calling him “a Marcel Proust of our time.”