Honeymoon

In Honeymoon by Patrick Modiano, Jean B., the narrator 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. He begins to take what seems to be a journey to nowhere.

Jean pretends to fly to Rio to make another film but instead returns to his Parisian suburb. He decides to spend his solitary days recounting or imagining the lives of Ingrid and Rigaud. Jean met the refugee couple twenty years before. It was in them 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. His slow excavation of the past slowly becomes an all-encompassing obsession.

The New Yorker wrote, “Honeymoon by Patrick Modiano [t]urns 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.