Short. Very atmospherically Céline. Delightfully odd and intense and very interesting. ( )

I didn’t like this book at all. In fact, let’s take the gloves off and tell it straight. I actively and passionately disliked this appalling book. The publisher’s blurb led me to expect a beautifully written exploration of the life of a man caught on a desperate dilemma, living a life as a double agent engaged with both the Resistance and the Gestapo in occupied France during the Second World War. I have seldom been sold a bigger dummy.

The book starts with a garbled and inchoate account of a gathering of ghastly characters behaving in an unrelentingly implausible manner, and then just goes downhill from there. I struggle enough to get through most days without at least fleetingly thinking about hanging myself, without being immersed in such an unwholesome broth of rage, squalor and despair. If this is even vaguely representative of Patrick Modiano’s oeuvre as a whole, then I can't understand how he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Perhaps that year the Selection Committee was modelling itself on FIFA. ( )

Found this in Any Amount of Books on Charing Cross Road on a Friday evening. Read it within hours. All books by Modiano are outstanding. This is the one where the main character is a double agent. Brings Paris to life.