So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood, by Patrick Modiano

I moved a week ago today. I've been living without most of my books since early October when I boxed them up and moved them ahead of the big move. This morning I set up my bookshelves (three of them at least) and unpacked my 18 boxes of fiction. It's wonderful to be reunited with these books. I've spent the bulk of the last week unpacking and organizing, so after lunch I decided to give myself the afternoon off to read one of my newly close-at-hand books. For reasons I can't exactly articulate, or maybe just reasons I don't want to go into at the moment, Patrick Modiano was the clear choice. I had kept out another book of his – a trilogy, in fact, in a single volume – but I decided to pick a book I could read in one sitting. 

So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood is just 150 pages, which was the primary reason I chose it. I hadn't realized it was a relatively recent book (2014) and I was caught off guard when a reference to a mobile phone showed up in the first paragraphs, but true to what I expected from Modiano, the heart of the book is in the past, in those early post War years in Paris. The narrator is an old man who is thrust back into memories of his childhood and early adulthood following an encounter with a pair of mysterious strangers. The book takes place in three distinct times: 1951 when the narrator was a young child; 15 years later when he is unexpectedly reconnected with that childhood year; and 2012 when it all comes back again. Modiano gets to the heart of memory and loss like nobody, and this book is an excellent example of that.