En el café de la juventud perdida

Paris, the 1960s. At the Café Le Condé, a gathering place for aristocratic poets, future Situationists, and students captivated by Parisian bohemia takes place. And although nostalgia for those lost years might seem to be the novel's central theme, Modiano gives it a surprising twist. Because In the Café of Lost Youth is also a mystery novel. All the characters, all the stories, converge on the enigmatic Louki. Four men recount their encounters and missed connections with the daughter of a Moulin Rouge worker. Some seek her out, others love her, and for almost all of them, the girl embodies the unattainable object of desire. Louki, like all those who accompany her on her wanderings through a spectral Paris, is a rootless character, living by inventing identities, reborn time and again, struggling to construct a perpetual present. Modiano recreates the Paris of Louki's youth around the fascinating and moving figure of Louki, while at the same time constructing, with his unmistakable style, a beautiful novel about the power of memory and the search for identity, two major themes in the work of the French writer.