Review: In the Café of Lost Youth

In the Café of Lost Youth by Patrick Modiano
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The English of the title here introduces a nice ambiguity that isn’t quite there in the original French. (Shout out to Mrs. Nichols and Mrs. Bork – I’m using my French!) The French is in the singular which tells us that which is lost is a concept, a feeling/time of our protagonist’s long-ago youth. In English, though, “youth” can mean the singular or the plural. It can also refer to those youth who were part of that world with the result that it would refer to multiple protagonists.

Even without that ambiguity – at least without it to the same degree as it’s present in English – this is a novel that feels as if it could be two different things. In structure, we get four “chapters,” four perspectives that border each other as character studies of a young woman, generally known as Louki, who’s a young woman in the Paris of the late 1950s. One perspective comes from a regular at a café where Louki often goes, one from a private detective hired by her husband to determine why she has left him, one from Louki herself, and one from her wannabe writer lover.

The initial perspective gives the impression this is a story of “youth” in the plural. It feels like a group biography, or at least a group snapshot. I found myself imagining the Left Bank of Sartre and DeBouvoir, a Gitane-smoking, beret-wearing carnival of philosophical cool. At the heart of this café community is the budding intellectual Guy DeVere – I wouldn’t have known to spot him if not for the back-cover commentary, nor would I have connected him with Guy DeBord of whom I know only a little in his role as influencer of many of the French Postmodernist philosophers.

This feels for a time, in other words, like a study of the “youth” who came of age under the wings of those thinkers who survived World War II. They’re the ones who saw the tomorrow that their no-tomorrow elders found after fascism had been defeated but at a price staggeringly high. As such, there’s a melancholy to it; the fact that Modiano has written it is testimony that these “youth” grew up themselves, that the frozen-in-time café where they gathered and quietly observed their elders nurtured them with its existential cool.

At the same time, read backwards, this is a novel about one youth in particular, one who both matters more than all the others and yet who remains entirely a mystery. [MAJOR SPOILER] In the final pages, Louki kills herself, jumping out of a window without giving any hint of what motivated her. Her lover, who calls himself Roland (though that doesn’t seem to be his real name), mourns her, but less as a woman in her own right and more as a path he never followed. She is, for him, a could-have-been more than a woman in her own right.

The effect of that late reveal is to push us backwards to look for clues, to figure out what pushed her to it. She has many personal disappointments; her mother is an exotic dancer at the Moulin Rouge, and she herself is at least mistaken for a prostitute on several occasions. The weighty DeVere suggests books for her to read, and whether she reads them or merely carries them around isn’t clear.

But I get the impression that the larger cause, at least as Modiano’s various characters lead us to it, is that she is almost a necessary sacrifice as they grow older collectively. We are never allowed to see Louki in full, never allowed to see enough of her past and her potential to understand her on her own terms. She is always an object – of curiosity, of protection, or of desire – and even in her own narrated section she is acted upon more than acting. Her death seems to suggest the loss that stamps them all as “Lost.” It’s not until she dies that they can see themselves with some of the survivors’ glow they recognize in the older few around them.

I’ve wanted to read Modiano ever since he won the Nobel. I’ll hold off offering judgment on him until I’ve read another one or two. For now, with this one, I love the atmosphere, and I admire the skill of the different, complementary narrators. Excellent and movingly ambiguous as it is, though, it strikes me as possibly too empty. Modiano hints at many things, but he consistently cuts them off. Whether this is “youth” in the singular – as a story of Louki and her unknowable sadness – or of “youth” in the plural – of the way a now aging generation found themselves unscarred children among wounded survivors – it feels slighter than its ambition.


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