Honeymoon - (Verba Mundi (Hardcover)) by Patrick Modiano (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

An engrossing mystery of a life from master storyteller Patrick Modiano: winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

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.

The New Yorker wrote, "Turning to invention to get at deeper realities of experience is fiction's righteous mission, and Honeymoon performs it beautifully. We all hold the keys to mysteries of our own making, Modiano tells us. If only we knew where we hid them." This is a singular literary experience, a masterpiece of world literature.

From the Back Cover

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.

Review Quotes

Praise for Honeymoon

"A beautiful example of Modiano's fluid storytelling."--Booklist

"Haunting, ambiguous, and more universal than one might expect... Honeymoon is shaped by the imperfections and subjectivity of knowledge, and by WWII, the black hole of French memory."--Publishers Weekly

"Turning to invention to get at deeper realities of experience is fiction's righteous mission, and Honeymoon performs it beautifully. We all hold the keys to mysteries of our own making, Modiano tells us. If only we knew where we hid them."--New Yorker