Missing Person

Missing Person (translated from "Rue des Boutiques Obscures") is the sixth novel by French writer Patrick Modiano, published on 5 September 1978. In the same year it was awarded the Prix Goncourt. The English translation by Daniel Weissbort was published in 1980. Rue des Boutiques Obscures (literally 'the Street of dark shops') is the name of a street in Rome (La Via delle Botteghe Oscure).Guy Roland is a detective who, after the retirement of his boss, van Hutte, decides to leave in 1965 to find his own identity, which he lost after a mysterious accident fifteen years earlier that left him an amnesiac. Ascending the slopes of his tenuous past that seems to stop during the Second World War, he learns that he is called Jimmy Pedro Stern, a Greek Jew from Salonica living in Paris under an assumed name, Pedro McEvoy, and working for the legation of the Dominican Republic. This McEvoy Pedro was surrounded by friends: Denise Coudreuse a French model who shares his life, Freddie Howard Luz of Mauritius, Gay Orlov an American dancer of Russian origin, André Wildmer a former English jockey, who all decided in 1940 to get to Megeve to flee a Paris that had become more oppressive during the German occupation. Denise and Pedro had decided to flee to Switzerland, and paid a smuggler who abandoned them in the mountain, separating them and leaving them only lost in the snow.Guy Roland decides to leave France to try to trace Freddie, who went live in Polynesia after the war. When he arrives in Bora Bora, he learns that Freddie has disappeared, either lost at sea or by choice. The last link that remains for Guy Pedro Stern to track is an address that he held in 1930. Winner of the Prix Goncourt In this strange, elegant novel, winner of France's premier literary prize, Patrick Modiano portrays a man in pursuit of the identity he lost in the murky days of the Paris Occupation, the black hole of French memory. For ten years Guy Roland has lived without a past. His current life and name were given to him by his recently retired boss, Hutte, who welcomed him, a onetime client, into his detective agency. Guy makes full use of Hutte's files - directories, yearbooks, and papers of all kinds going back half a century - but his leads are few. Could he really be the person in that photograph, a young man remembered by some as a South American attach?©? Or was he someone else, perhaps the disappeared scion of a prominent local family? He interviews strangers and is tantalized by half-clues until, at last, he grasps a thread that leads him through the maze of his own repressed experience. On one level Missing Person is a detective thriller, a 1950s film noir mix of smoky caf?©s, illegal passports, and insubstantial figures crossing bridges in the fog. On another level, it is also a haunting meditation on the nature of the self. Modiano's sparce, hypnotic prose, superbly translated by Daniel Weissbort, draws his readers into the intoxication of a rare literary experience. (Verba Mundi) **