Honeymoon

De: Patrick Modiano

Narrado por: Bronson Pinchot

Jean B. is submerged in a world where night and day, past and present have no demarcations. Having spent his entire adult life making documentary movies about lost explorers, Jean suddenly decides to abandon his wife and career and takes what seems to be a journey to nowhere. He spends his solitary days recounting or imagining the lives of Ingrid and Rigaud, a refugee couple he met more than 20 years ago. Little by little, their story takes on more reality than Jean's existence, as his excavation of the past slowly becomes an all-encompassing obsession.

In Honeymoon, Patrick Modiano constructs an existential tale of suspense, of longing, and of the past's hold over a shifting, ambiguous present. Barbara Wright's translation remains true to Modiano's simple, melodious prose of a born storyteller.

©1990 Éditions Gallimard. Translation © 1992 by HarperCollins Publishers (P)2016 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Brilliant, Haunting

Patrick Modiano visits and revisits familiar themes in many of his books: riddles of memory, identity and loss; unsettled ghosts of the occupation; a deeply personal psychogeography of Paris with some departures to the Côte d'Azur and clandestine border crossings. His concise but hypnotic semiautobiographical delivery and device of "struggling to recall" the transient relationships of youth - girlfriends, ersatz networks and "families", long gone parents and their shady friends - pull you into these interlocking and slim but profoundly moving volumes. Honeymoon is beautifully narrated by Bronson Pinchot, with his soft and faintly ironic and puzzled tones. I wish he'd read for us more than just a handful of Modiano's many novels dating from the late 60s to the present.