Missing Person, by Patrick Modiano

After  a very busy April, I took a much-needed day off work yesterday. It was a perfect kind of day to read a book cover to cover. I did't actually read Missing Person in one sitting. I read it in bits, in bed in the morning, after my coffee, on the subway when I went downtown to run errands, on the subway back home, on the couch for an hour, on the subway on my way to the gym (which was seriously delayed and gave me more than an hour of reading time!), and I finished it while walking down Nostrand Avenue from the subway to my home.

I was reading while standing on the platform at Union Square waiting for the 4 train at around 7:15 last night when I had a profound sense of deja vu. The book mentioned a woman in the Place Malesherbes who might buy jewels from the narrator and I was sure I knew this street from something else. Earlier, the book mentioned the Parc Monceau, which I knew I had visited in Paris, and it came up in this passage again. I pulled up my map of Paris and suddenly I could picture it all. The park I remember clearly -- it was an unseasonably warm March day and the park was full of people. Apparently I only took one photo in the park.

After visiting the Parc Monceau, I also remember walking around the block of what had been Place Malesherbes (it is no longer called by that name), looking for a particular building only to find it was completely covered in scaffolding and tarp. The building I was looking for was built for the banker and art collector Émile Gaillard by the architect Jules Février. My whole excursion to this section of Paris was apparently inspired by an article on Émile Zola’s Paris.

Missing Person gives off the most intense sense of nostalgia. Not only because it is set a decade or so after WWII, but certainly that is a factor, it reminded me frequently of French new wave films. The French have again and again borrowed American noir story tropes and complicated them, and this book is an excellent example of that. The book takes place some 10 years after the end of the war and the narrator, who has been employed by a private detective, suffers from amnesia and doesn't know who he is. After the retirement of his employer, he decides to use the tools he has learned through his trade to try and discover his own past. The mystery unfolds in a beautiful and wholly unexpected way.