Invisible Ink

August 17, 2020
Nobel laureate Modiano delivers a mesmerizing, enigmatic novel in the vein of many of his best-known works. Like Missing Person, the book is about a private eye—albeit a shabby and halfhearted one—who once briefly worked for the Hutte Detective Agency in Paris, and like Dora Bruder, it centers on the investigation of an unsolved disappearance. But Modiano eschews the political overtones that drove those books, telling instead a story about growing old and the gaps and omissions that make up a life.
Jean Eyben looks back on his 20s, when he was assigned to investigate the disappearance of Noëlle Lefebvre. As he searched, he had a series of phantomlike encounters with people whose lives each briefly intersected with Lefebvre’s in the 1960s. Her fate becomes a lifelong obsession, and Eyben recounts the story circuitously, as if remembering it as he writes, which casts an irresistible spell. As Eyben’s search deepens, he wonders whether Lefebvre has some connection to his own life. All of Modiano’s works are variations on a theme, and his newest is no different, but its dreamlike prose and a beguiling structural twist make it a worthy and satisfying addition to his accomplished oeuvre.

October 1, 2020

Nobel Prize winner Modiano's title smartly ties together the theme, plot, and ambience of his latest book to be translated, which opens with the narrator taking a low-level job with a detective agency in Paris as background for his writing. Soon he's tasked with discovering what happened to No�lle Lefebvre, whose disappearance may or may not be entirely innocent. Recalling the 30-year-old case in the present--and how he tried to pick it up ten years after it first surfaced--he relates trying to untangle threads leading to friends and lovers, some of whom he knows tangentially from Annecy. The past overlaps and memories half-emerge in classic Modiano fashion, just as a message in invisible ink tentatively reveals itself in the right light. The book has that foggy-night-on-the-Seine feel but ends up in Rome, where a new character articulates her need to have escaped and, somewhat unusually for Modiano, her actual pain in remembering and the desire to tie up loose ends. VERDICT Not a place to start with Modiano but a familiar pleasure for fans, again rendered excellently by Polizzotti.

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