Missing Person

by Patrick Modiano

Paperback, 2004

Call number

FIC MOD

Collection

Publication

David R Godine (2004), 168 pages

Description

"For ten years Guy Roland has lived without a past. His current life and name were given to him by his recently retired boss, Hutte, who welcomed him, a one-time client, into his detective agency. Guy makes full use of Hutte's files - directories, yearbooks, and papers of all kinds going back half a century - but leads to his former life are few. Could he really be that person in a photograph, a young man remembered by some as a South American attache? Or was he someone else, perhaps the disappeared scion of a prominent local family? He interviews strangers and is tantalized by half-clues until, at last, he grasps a thread that leads him through the maze of his own repressed experience."

User reviews

LibraryThing member thorold
This is a kind of detective story, with lots of Simenonish mid-20th century Paris atmosphere. An amnesiac private detective is trying to track down his own earlier life. Modiano is obviously a big fan of unanswered questions, so he never really tells us when the foreground story is set, but we are
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allowed to realise that the key events in the back-story took place during the German occupation. The main characters are all more-or-less from the generation of Modiano's parents, so we're probably somewhere in the late fifties, about twenty years before the book was written.

Of course, it turns out that every piece of information that our detective manages to discover about himself only raises more questions. The witnesses who could have given him the full story are either dead or have disappeared; his own memories, when they start to come back, are not entirely trustworthy; names and addresses turn out to be false; individual stories refuse to connect together into a closed narrative. If the past is another country, then as far as Modiano is concerned he will always be an illegal immigrant there. Obviously a lot of this is Modiano dealing with his own peculiar background, but it does also seem to be saying more general things about the - possibly misleading - ways in which memory and narrative work together.
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LibraryThing member kaulsu
This is a well designed and thought-out book. Not formulaic; no sequels expected. When Modiano received the Nobel, the article in The Washington Post recommended that this was the most accessible of his books. It took me some time to get a handle on the plot. I admit that it was my own hubris that
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prevented me from reading the back cover--had I done so, I would have understood that the protagonist was more than simply an amnesiac. I won't say more (no spoiler alert), but I humbly suggest that knowing more may help the reader understand what is going on sooner.

I found it interesting that all of the Modiano books available at the time I was looking were translated by different writers. I would think that once a writer or their publisher found a good translator, they would stick with that one. What do I know?
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LibraryThing member RandyMetcalfe
Guy Roland describes himself as nothing. And he might just be right. Certainly the name ‘Guy Roland’ is as made up as his dubious identity papers. But when Hutte, at whose detective agency he has worked for the past ten years, got him the name and papers, he thought he was doing him a favour.
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With no memory of his past, Guy might as well be ‘Guy’. And something also must have forewarned Guy not to search too assiduously for himself, because he has been working at a detective agency for ten years before he even begins to search in earnest. By now the trail is mostly cold. As are the bodies that many people tell him are just part of the past.

With elements of noire — fog shrouded Parisian nights, murders witnessed or abetted, false identities, and a host of Russian, American, and British ex-pats — Modiano’s novel leaps the boundaries of genre. Neither the hard-bitten detective story, nor the existentialist mire. For how could the nothing that is Guy have enough presence to even define himself through action? Guy is not much more than smoke, and like memories of childhood, ever fleeting and retreating. Even his best clues lead him astray. And when he does settle upon who he thinks he might have been, he is as uncertain as he might be if he had simply invented his past.

The writing here is crisp and pressing. And the pacing is precise. Even when you think the novel may be headed toward a satisfying (in one sense) denouement it switches back and leaves you, along with Guy, bereft.

Highly recommended.
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LibraryThing member The_Hibernator
Ten years ago, amnesiac Guy Rowland hired a private investigator to figure out who he was and where he came from. Soon afterwards, the PI gave Guy a new identity and a job as the PI's assistant, saying that sometimes it's best not to remember who you are. But now that his good friend and employer
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has retired, Guy again begins his search for identity.

Reading this book made me understand why Modiano won the Nobel Prize in literature. The prose was almost poetic, and the imagery was gripping. For instance, he found a drained, emotionally dying clue to his past in a run-down bar. The whole chapter was filled with coffin and morgue imagery, complete with an "embalmed man" who observed everything, no matter how stimulating, without blinking an eye. All of Modiano's chapters were set up in this way - with vivid imagery fitting the clue that he had found - though the imagery was always dark and mysterious.

Unsurprising for a book about amnesia, the over-arching theme of the story was identity. Who am I? Does my past change who I am? These questions are explored as Guy's own vision of who he is transforms as he gets more clues. We can only wonder at the end if he's really found his real self, or if he's just adopted the identity of a man who fits the person Guy wants to be.

I definitely urge you to read Missing Person. I hope I find the time to read more Modiano in the future.
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LibraryThing member Dreesie
When the 2014 Nobel prize winner in literature was announced, I had no idea who he was.

My library has many of his works. Largely in French. I know my French is not good enough to read the work of a Nobel prize winner.

I picked this book because it was fairly short. I good intro. And it is
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translated, of course.

And wow. What a little book. 4.5 stars.

This is the story of one "Guy Roland", who is trying to find his own history--lost to him sometime during WWII in occupied France. Who was he? What happened to him?

The pacing is fascinating, the cadence of the language is unusual. The story itself unwinds like a mysteryäóîbut there are so many false leads. Or are they?

The ending, though, is less satisfying. We know what happened to one of his friends, maybe 2--but the others? What really happened to him? What was his original identity? What were they involved in? If he was really left to die on the mountain, how did he get out?
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LibraryThing member jonfaith
Hutte, for instance, used to quote the case of a fellow he called "the beach man." This man had spent forty years of his life on beaches or by the sides of swimming pools, chatting pleasantly with summer visitors and rich idlers. He is to be seen, in his bathing costume, in the corners and
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backgrounds of thousands of holiday snaps, among groups of happy people, but no one knew his name and why he was there. And no one noticed when one day he vanished from the photographs.

A.S. Byatt once noted she finished David Mitchell's Ghostwritten at a busy airport baggage carousel and found the location infinitely appropriate. Likewise I found myself this morning in a darkened swirl of insomnia and read the final 100 pages of Missing Person. Periodically I stared about our quiet living room. I looked at where this afternoon I'll put the Christmas tree I buy at the supermarket. I looked out the window and the neighbors' seasonal lights. I don't question why we don't employ our own. I just don't. Life is often hazy and ill-defined. I wish I had the means at the disposal of Modiano's protagonist. I certainly liked this one better than my previous exposure to the Nobel Laureate. I think the sinister whispers of history were significant here. I'd recommend Missing Person as a premium point of departure for this strange author.
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Pages

168

ISBN

1567922813 / 9781567922813
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