Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano again journeys through nostalgia and lost youth. Villa Triste ("Sad House") portrays the lies people tell themselves and the ones they love. Fans of Modiano's previous work will find the same haunting quality to this novel, translated into English by John Cullen.
Alone in a vacation spot on the French-Swiss border, Modiano's narrator encounters an old friend, Meinthe, from his previous stay in the town. When visiting as a young man, he fell in with Meinthe and Yvonne Jacquet, two bohemians who had never left their idyllic hometown. Looking back to his youth, the narrator relates his intrusion into their lives, and how his need for growth eventually led to a reckoning with their passive ways.
As in many of Modiano's novels, the narrator's motives remain mostly secret, but his urge to remake himself is the clear defining force for the narrative. Arriving in town under an assumed name, he presents himself as a count, and ultimately cannot stay in the easy existence Yvonne and Meinthe have created for themselves, all too aware of how fragile it is. With the layers of secrecy surrounding each character, the reader must always peer through the narrative at what their aims truly are. Villa Triste is like a mystery with no solution; the enigma of the major characters provides enough tension to pull the story along, finally ending where it began, with the narrator looking back. --Noah Cruickshank, marketing manager, Open Books, Chicago, Ill.