In the Café of Lost Youth
Literature | Movies | Training
28 January 2021
Patrick Modiano won the Nobel Prize in 2014. In Literature. 14 Frenchmen have. Prudhomme won the first and they've landed one roughly every decade since. Before picking up In the Café of Lost Youth I have to admit that I'd never heard of Modiano. Then again, I don't know who most of the Literature laureates are or what they've written. I do have a French Jazz Café playlist that I listen to. I was listening to it tonight as I finished this book. Spoiler alert: she dies at the end. Which I guess appropriate for a coming of age story in the age of millennials. They're so damn fatalistic. And seem to all secretly or not so secretly be enjoying getting to have their own apocalypse story with the covid pandemic. Maybe it's because they're not having enough sex. Modiano's Café of Lost Youth fittingly takes place in Paris, where the characters often find themselves in cafés or bars. Not so infrequently they're one and the same. Each chapter is told from a different person's perspective at a different point in time, including that of the woman around whom the tale swirls. At times I really wished that I read French well enough not to have read it in English. Euan Cameron's text is quite approachable; it's just that there clearly some phrase choices in the original that have to be explained in the translation. I've also never walked walked the streets of Paris. I think a map might have been helpful when reading. If you have the time to read it without putting it down that's also probably best. I had to put it down half way through and just wasn't as engaged picking it back up. C'est la vie...
Marché de Noël, Reims, 2019
I know it's not Paris, but my photos of De Gaulle Airport are even less spectacular.
