Young Once - Patrick Modiano

nAn NYRB Classics Original nWinner of the Nobel Prize in Literature n n Young Once is a crucial book in the career of Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano. It was his breakthrough novel, in which he stripped away the difficulties of his earlier work and found a clear, mysteriously moving voice for his haunting stories of love, nostalgia, and grief. It has also been called the most gripping Modiano book of all (Der Spiegel).

n n Odile and Louis are leading a happy, bucolic life with their two children in the French countryside near the Swiss mountains. It is Odile's thirty-fifth birthday, and Louis's thirty-fifth birthday is a few weeks away. Then the story shifts back to their early years: Louis, just freed from his military service and at loose ends, is taken up by a shady character who brings him to Paris to do some work for a friend who manages a garage; Odile, an aspiring singer, is at the mercy of the kindness and unkindness of strangers.

In a Paris that is steeped in crime and full of secrets, they find each other and struggle together to create what, looking back, will have been their youth.n