Patrick Modiano's 1981 novel, Young Once (never before translated into English), opens shortly before both Odile and her husband Louis's 35th birthday, with their children playing in the garden of their chalet near Switzerland. But this is actually the end of the story, and after nine pages, as Louis is driving a friend to the train station, he's caught in the rain and begins to remember getting out of the military service on a similar rainy day 15 years before. The remainder of the novel is his memory of that time.
A mysterious, quickly made pal of two months helps Louis get dry shoes and a room with a bath, and promises to introduce him to an important friend who will give him a job. Odile, similarly searching for employment, meets a talent scout for a record company who promises to give her work. The two 19-year-olds are thrown together in postwar Paris, and have only each other to cling to when they are asked to transport of suitcase full of money out of the country.
The enigmatic characters swirling around them (Brossier, Bejardy, Bellune, Bauer), ensnaring them in a youthful wartime indiscretion, have vague identities, unclear motives and a surreal similarity. The relationship between two of them, Brossier and Bejardy, spans the entire novel, slowly accruing details and a past without losing its ultimately unknowable nature. The scenes with the fat blond policeman pursuing Odile are appropriately anxiety inducing. Even greater tension is generated by the predator who lures her into his car. Clinging to the last of their dreams, alone and lost in Paris, Odile and Louis both become compromised by wartime morality.
Modiano's stark, unadorned style is anything but simple. His world is opaque and doesn't surrender answers readily. Characters are sometimes little more than names whose actions are unpredictable. His language can be vague, often ambiguous. Unlike some of Modiano's later plots that lose steam halfway through or stubbornly refuse to tie up at the end, the plot of Young Once continues to build throughout.
Though the reader is perfectly aware from the first page that Louis and Odile will marry and have children, Modiano still manages to make their coming together appear fragile and endangered as they escape from their youth to find themselves at the rich old age of 35, convinced that now at last they are through changing, not realizing how young they still are. --Nick DiMartino, Nick's Picks, University Book Store, Seattle, Wash.
Shelf Talker: A married couple in their mid-30s look back on their youth in postwar Paris in Nobel Prize-winner Patrick Modiano's fifth novel, never before translated into English.