An engrossing mystery of a life from master storyteller Patrick
Modiano: winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
Jean B., the narrator of Patrick Modiano's Honeymoon, is submerged
in a world where day and night, past and present, have no demarcations.
Having spent his adult life making documentary films about lost
explorers, Jean suddenly decides to abandon his wife and career, and
takes what seems to be a journey to nowhere.
He pretends to fly to Rio to make another film, but instead returns to
his own Parisian suburb to spend his solitary days recounting or
imagining the lives of Ingrid and Rigaud, a refugee couple he had met
twenty years before, and in whom he had recognized a spiritual anomie
that seemed to reflect and justify his own. Little by little, their
story takes on more reality than Jean's daily existence, as his
excavation of the past slowly becomes an all-encompassing obsession.
The New Yorker wrote, "Turning to invention to get at deeper realities
of experience is fiction's righteous mission, and
Honeymoon performs it beautifully. We all hold the keys to mysteries
of our own making, Modiano tells us. If only we knew where we hid them."
This is a singular literary experience, a masterpiece of world
literature.
