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Overview
Jean B., the narrator of Patrick Modiano's Honeymoon, is submerged in a world where day and night, past and present, have no demarcations. Having spent his adult life making documentary films about lost explorers, Jean suddenly decides to abandon his wife and career, and takes what seems to be a journey to nowhere. He pretends to fly to Rio to make another film, but instead returns to his own Parisian suburb to spend his solitary days recounting or imagining the lives of Ingrid and Rigaud, a refugee couple he had met twenty years before, and in whom he had recognized a spiritual anomie that seemed to reflect and justify his own. Little by little, their story takes on more reality than Jean's daily existence, as his excavation of the past slowly becomes an all-encompassing obsession.Synopsis
Jean B., the narrator of Patrick Modiano's Honeymoon, is submerged in a world where day and night, past and present, have no demarcations. Having spent his adult life making documentary films about lost explorers, Jean suddenly decides to abandon his wife and career, and takes what seems to be a journey to nowhere. He pretends to fly to Rio to make another film, but instead returns to his own Parisian suburb to spend his solitary days recounting or imagining the lives of Ingrid and Rigaud, a refugee couple he had met twenty years before, and in whom he had recognized a spiritual anomie that seemed to reflect and justify his own. Little by little, their story takes on more reality than Jean's daily existence, as his excavation of the past slowly becomes an all-encompassing obsession.
Library Journal
$19.95. F A winner of France's prestigious Prix Goncourt, Modiano is the author of 17 novels as well as the screenplay for Louis Malle's noteworthy film, Lacombe Lucien. In this slight but probing novel, a middle-aged man decides to take a ``honeymoon.'' Scheduled to fly to Brazil on a job, documentary filmmaker Jean B. instead slips away to Milan and then returns to a Parisian suburb. There he attempts to trace the life and death (by suicide) of a woman named Ingrid, whom he met while hitchhiking to Saint-Tropez. World War II is raging, and Ingrid, who is traveling with her husband, clearly has something to hide. Ingrid's mystery is not rewardingly played out, but Modiano is a wonderfully evocative writer--there's a nice touch of menace throughout, and the cool, collected writing feels like a salve. For literary collections.-- Barbara Hoffert, ``Library Journal''