Synopsis
A writer discovers a set of notes in his notebook and sets off on a journey through the Paris of his past, in search of the woman he loved forty years previously.
Set in the Montparnasse district of Paris, the author, Jean, retraces his nocturnal footsteps around the left bank during France's period of decolonisation during the 1960's. He tries to remember what brought him into contact with a gang that frequented the hotel Unic in the area. His quest through seedy cafés and cheap hotels becomes an enquiry into a woman, Dannie, whom Jean loved and who once tried to admit to a terrible crime. Over the course of several voyages between past and present, we meet various shady characters, and discover that Dannie may have killed "someone". As his memories overlap with the discovery of an old vice squad dossier, Jean reinvestigates the closed case of a crime where he could well be the last remaining witness.
Translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti
From the Back Cover
1960s Paris, a mysterious girl, a group of shady characters, danger . . . Modiano s folklore is set out from the beginning . . . and sheer magic follows once more. Vogue
The prose elliptical, muted, eloquent falls on the reader like an enchantment . . . No one is currently writing such beautiful tales of loss, melancholy, and remembrance. Independent
Sublime . . . [A] magnificent novel that reawakens days long past, illuminating them with a dazzling light. Elle (France)
In the aftermath of Algeria s war of independence, Paris was a city rife with suspicion and barely suppressed violence. Amid this tension, Jean, a young writer adrift, met and fell for Dannie, an enigmatic woman fleeing a troubled past. A half century later, with his old black notebook as a guide, he retraces this fateful period in his life, recounting how, through Dannie, he became mixed up with a group of unsavory characters connected by a shadowy crime. Soon Jean, too, was a person of interest to the detective pursuing their case a detective who would prove instrumental in revealing Dannie s darkest secret.
The Black Notebook bears all the hallmarks of this Nobel Prize winning literary master s unsettling and intensely atmospheric style. Once again, Patrick Modiano invites us into his unique world, a Paris infused with melancholy, uncertain danger, and the fading echoes of lost love.
Never before has Modiano written a novel as lyrical as this . . . Both carefully wrought and superbly fluid, sustained by pure poetry. Le Monde
Patrick Modiano is the author of more than twenty novels, including several bestsellers. He has won the Prix Goncourt, the Grand Prix National des Lettres, and many other honors. In 2014 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. He lives in Paris.
Mark Polizzotti has translated more than forty books from the French, including Modiano s Suspended Sentences. He is director of the publications program at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
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