Missing Person

Missing Person Synopsis

An amnesiac searches for his identity, from Polynesia to Rome, in this novel by the Nobel Prize-winning author of Dora Bruder.Guy Roland is in pursuit of the identity he lost in the murky days of the Paris Occupation. For ten years, he 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 attache? 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.Published in France as Rue des Boutiques obscures, this is both a detective mystery and a haunting meditation on the nature of the self, Patrick Modiano's spare, hypnotic prose, superbly translated by Daniel Weissbort, draws readers into the intoxication of a rare literary experience.Praise for Missing Persons"e;[An] elliptical, engrossing rumination on the essence of identity and the search for self."e; -Frank Sennet, Booklist"e;A fine introduction to his work. . . .

Beautifully written and perfectly noirish, as though the world were being seen through a haze of Gauloise smoke. Be warned, though: after reading this, a sensitive soul may well seize up the next time a stranger waves."e; -Kirkus Reviews