Young Once

Patrick Modiano, who went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote this novel as a turning point in his career. Here he set aside the dense style of his earlier books and wrote with a plainer, more lucid voice, while keeping the haunting concerns that mark his work: love, longing for the past, and loss.

The novel opens with Odile and Louis raising two children in the French countryside, close to the Swiss mountains. Odile is turning thirty-five, and Louis will reach the same age a few weeks later. The narrative then travels back to the years when the two were young. Louis, newly discharged from military service and without direction, falls in with a dubious man who takes him to Paris to help a friend who runs a garage. Odile, a hopeful singer, depends on the generosity and cruelty of people she barely knows.

Set in a Paris shadowed by crime and secrets, the two young people find each other and work together to build the life that, seen from later on, becomes their youth.