Welcome to Litsy!

Picked this up at the library while browsing. Not too familiar with the author but I grabbed this and one other book by him so we'll see what happens.

Georgella helped @Howardsimmons pick out his next book! Which is really a feat considered she can‘t read and is a cat. Basically she was like: “That one! Or that other one. It doesn‘t really matter just give me a g-d treat.” And she sounds like Liz Taylor in #whosafraidofvirginiawoolf.

I finished this book a few days ago. Throughout the story we are facing blurred memories. Can we actually make sense of memories??? That's pretty much what this book is about. Interesting read, but sometimes frustrating...

This was just too strange and confusing for me.... luckily that is done and I have some exciting books lined up for the long weekend 🤗

I'm still processing how I feel about this book: the writing style felt incredibly opaque to me and even labyrinthine at times. But Modiano is writing about memory in all it's strange fallibility and never ending contortions so even though the experience of reading it could feel frustrating at times, that was obviously very much the point.

P. M. Literaturnobelpreisträger 2014
Dem Buch vorangestellt ist ein Zitat von Stendhal:
„Ich kann die Wirklichkeit des Geschehenen nicht darstellen, ich kann nur seinen Schatten zeigen.“
Dieses Zitat bringt den kleinen, stillen Roman, über die Schwierigkeiten des Erinnerns auf den Punkt. So erklärt sich auch, warum er einen mit viel mehr Fragen, als Antworten zurücklässt. Die Andeutungen im Buch auf das Rotlichtmilieu werden vom Cover bestätigt.

"It would appear, he often used to say to himself, that children never ask themselves any questions. Many years afterwards, we attempt to solve puzzles that were not mysteries at the time and we try to decipher half-obliterated letters from a language that is too old and whose alphabet we don't even know."

This atmospherically falls in the film noir genre which I'm always a fan & my 2nd Modiano book. Unfortunately when this story reached it's end, it went over my head. Unlike in Missing Person, I enjoyed the unresolved ending. Here, I can't say such. Maybe it was a different translator, but I enjoyed the text less overall, even though it had great mood. I felt there was something in it that was just slightly out of reach. May try a reread 1 day.