Dog spring

Patrick Modiano's Most Mysterious Book: At nineteen, on a spring morning in 1964, the narrator meets photographer Francis Jansen. He works in Paris for an American magazine, was friends with Robert Capa, was seeing a woman named Colette Laurent who now searches for him incessantly, keeps all his photographs in three suitcases, and disappears without a trace. An elusive and mysterious man, Jansen is part of the gallery of types who, as only Patrick Modiano can describe, prefer silence and reticence to words. The narrator returns to remote neighborhoods, tries to find lost people, and seeks to break through the layer of silence and amnesia surrounding him. Silhouettes elude him; after thirty years, faces are no longer clear. He longs to recover the past, so that it becomes something more than distant and absent fragments. Everything gives him a feeling of unreality. And it is in the search for the past, for Francis Jansen and so many others, that his identity is remembered.