Villa Triste

Best not to aggravate that fear, that feeling of imminent disaster. Concentrate on trivialities: fashion, literature, cinema, variety shows. Stretch out on the long deck chairs, close your eyes and relax. Above all, relax. Forget. Right? A man looks back on a city half lost and a summer clearly remembered as one of the last witnesses to a fading, beautiful world in the fleeting moment before its end. At the outbreak of the Algerian war, a young man who calls himself Victor Chmara flees Paris for a small lakeside town on the border of France and Switzerland. It’s here that he meets the flamboyant doctor René Meinthe and the mysterious auburn-haired Yvonne. Victor quickly embraces their world of local pageants, soirees and late-night debauchery, and begins to settle into an endless summer with Yvonne. But René and Yvonne’s lives are also full of unanswered questions and half-truths. As he looks back years later, Victor remains beguiled and mystified by those lost, unknowable friends and the enchanted place he chose to leave behind. One of Modiano’s most elegiac and haunting novels, Villa Triste is an intoxicating investigation into time, place, identity, and memory. Translated by John Cullen ‘A small masterpiece’ – The Guardian ‘The more Modiano you read, the more seductive his work becomes. This is why it’s important to have as much translated as possible. It is cumulative reading that makes his books so hypnotic and compulsive.’ – The Telegraph A bestselling author in his native France and widely translated across Europe, it nevertheless took winning the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature for Patrick Modiano’s work to be translated into English. One of the most important novelists of the late twentieth century, Jean Patrick Modiano’s first novel La Place de l’Étoile was hailed as a major work of post-Holocaust fiction, later published together in English with two of his later novels, La Ronde de nuit (The Night Watch) and Les Boulevards de ceinture (Ring Roads) as The Occupation Trilogy. His later works include L'Herbe de nuitst (The Black Notebook) and Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier (So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood).