Honeymoon
Patrick Modiano
Language: English
Pages: 128
ISBN: 1567925383
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Modiano, winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature, constructs "a haunting tale of quiet intensity"; (Review of Contemporary Fiction). It parallels the story of Jean B., a filmmaker who abandons his wife and career to hole up in a Paris hotel, with that of Ingrid and Rigaud, a refugee couple he'd met twenty years before, and whose mystery continues to haunt him.
them. I thought them well suited to each other; he was dark and she was fair. Perhaps that was how Annette and I had looked at the same age. I found their presence reassuring, and they communicated something of their mysterious power and freshness to me, because I was in good spirits for the rest of the day. That boy and girl made me reflect on my first meeting with Ingrid and Rigaud on the Saint-Raphaël road. I wondered why they’d stopped their car and invited me to their place so very
planning to the Indian Ocean to search for the wreck of a Dutch galleon, and to share his dreams and illusions with me. “And you?” he asked. “Are you counting on staying here long?” He pointed despairingly at the Boulevard Soult outside the café window: “Then I can tell Annette to come and see you?” “Tell her not to come just yet . . . She wouldn’t find me . . . We mustn’t rush things.” He frowned again, in the same studious way as before. He was trying to understand. He didn’t want to
childhood? Above all, it was the need to escape. I felt it in me, more violently than ever. There, in the plane taking me back to Paris, I had the impression of having escaped further even than if I had flown, as I should have, to Rio. * I know a lot of hotels in suburban Paris, and I had decided to switch regularly. The first in which I took a room was the Dodds Hotel, at the Porte Dorée. There I ran no risk of bumping into Annette. After I had left, Cavanaugh had certainly taken her to his
big café in the Avenue Daumesnil, sit down on the terrace and talk to the people next to me to dispel this feeling of unreality. But that would only further increase my malaise: if I got into conversation with strangers, they would answer me in a different language from mine. Then as a last resort I thought of phoning Annette from my room in the Dodds Hotel. No. I wouldn’t be able to get through to her from that room we may perhaps have occupied twenty years ago, the call would be jammed by all
stairs. Pacheco handed Rigaud a cardboard shoe box: “Here . . . You can check that it’s all there . . . Will you come and see us out?” Rigaud, shoe box in hand, preceded Ingrid down the stairs. They all found themselves on the steps outside the house. Night had fallen, and it was snowing slightly. The larger of the two vans began to drive off, and had difficulty in turning into the Rue de Tilsitt. Then the other van followed. “Maybe we could have dinner together,” Pacheco suggested. Rigaud