Honeymoon (Verba Mundi) Hardcover – May 3, 1995

"Honeymoon" (Voyage de noces) is one of Modiano’s novels in which the mystery proposed at the commencement of the book is more or less solved (spoiler alert). The plot is straightforward: it is told in a series of shifting scenes and time warps that provide a sense of depth that a linear narrative would not be able to accomplish.Jean B, a documentary film-maker, is on his way to Paris by train. He has a stopover in Milan. While there, he learns that a Frenchwoman killed herself in his hotel just two days before. Later, he realizes he knew the woman when he was twenty, eighteen years ago.Not long after returning to Paris, instead of flying to Rio for work, he abandons his wife and his life and goes to live in the Parisian suburbs in an attempt to piece together the life of the woman who committed suicide: Ingrid Teyrsen. He explains why he is doing this to a friend: It’s very simple. "I just feel tired of my life and my job." He admits he may attempt to write her biography.The novel is bounded by two newspaper notices. The first notice Jean B reads in the train on the way to Paris. Printed in the "Corriere della Sera", it is the formal report of Ingrid’s suicide. The second notice, we learn later, was given to Jean by Ingrid Teyrsen herself many years earlier. It is a notice that had been placed in a Paris paper when she was a girl, a notice penned by her father: "Missing: Ingrid Teyrsen, sixteen, 1M60, oval face, grey eyes, brown sports coat, light blue pullover, beige skirt and hat, black casual shoes. All information to M. Teyrsen, 39bis, Boulevard Ornano, Paris."Between these two notices, we learn through Jean B some details of Ingrid’s life. She was married to a man named Rigaud. Jean B met her and her husband purely by chance, in the south of France during the final months of World War II. The couple was hiding out on the Côte d'Azur, telling people they were on honeymoon. They picked Jean B up hitchhiking, took him with them to Saint-Tropez, and insisted that he stay with them for a few days. When he had to go, they paid for his train ticket to Paris, even giving him spending money since his was stolen.That is the last he sees of Ingrid until years later, when, once again by chance, he happens upon her in Paris. They have a meal together and a desultory conversation during which Jean B notes: "It does also happen that one evening, because of someone’s attentive gaze, you feel a need to communicate to them not your experience, but quite simply some of the various details connected by an invisible thread, a thread which is in danger of breaking and which is called the course of a life."And of course, the thread had broken. Jean’s detective work uncovers the fact that Ingrid’s father was an Austrian Jew (and that she is therefore half-Jewish) and he couldn’t leave the city after the Germans invaded France. Returning from a dance class one night, Ingrid simply doesn’t go home. For whatever obscure reason, she cannot return. "Why did she feel so discouraged this evening at the prospect of going home to her father?" Perhaps, Jean B suggests: "She had a presentiment that if she went down the boulevard like the other people going home to the eighteenth arrondissement, the frontier would close behind her forever." So she walks on.Soon after abandoning her father, she calls to let him know she is ok. But she does not reach him. She calls again and although she is told he is expecting her call she hangs up before speaking to him. While Modiano does not give us a word about the father’s feelings, one can only imagine his concern: his fretting, his worry, his heartbreak at not knowing what happened to his sixteen-year-old daughter since it was during that time period that Jews were routinely rounded up and shipped to transit camps and then off to concentration camps and certain death. And then, one can picture his anguish and emotional collapse when he is eventually taken away, by some men, forever, not knowing what became of his daughter. And then, later, his daughter’s shock and distress when she finally decides to return to her father—only to discover that he has been, in today’s language, disappeared.Ingrid never sees her father again. The night she does not return home she takes up with Rigaud whom she meets in a café. After selling the contents of his mother’s apartment to raise money, he takes her under his protection to the south of France, where they cross paths with the narrator.In many ways, Ingrid’s plight resembles Dora’s in Modiano’s novel "Dora Bruder" about another missing girl, Dora. She wanders away from the school that was protecting her from the Nazis, also for reasons that remain undiscoverable. Like Ingrid’s father, Dora’s parents place an advertisement in the paper seeking the whereabouts of their daughter. And Dora, like Ingrid’s father, never returns. The last known notice of her occurs in the Tourelles Register for 1942. She had been interned: all the women in Tourelles were transferred to Drancy, and then on to Auschwitz where they were murdered.Modiano speculates that for Dora perhaps "it was the illusion that the passage of time is suspended, and that you need only slip through this breach to escape the trap which is closing around you…" We can speculate that it very well could have been the same illusion that Ingrid was under when she did not return home to her father that fateful night. Unlike Dora, Ingrid managed to avoid being rounded up and shipped off to a death camp, and she survived the war. But, it becomes clear, Ingrid could not survive the continual onslaught of her memories: "Circumstances and settings are of no importance. One day this sense of emptiness and remorse submerges you. Then, like a tide, it ebbs and disappears. But in the end it returns in force, and she couldn’t shake it off."See my full review of Modiano's work at: [...]

An interesting book, but difficult to follow at times. Of all of Modiano's books I've read, I wouldn't call it his best.

In order to appreciate this book, you must know a good deal about the holocaust in France, otherwise you won't have a clue about what is going on. To love this book you should probably read another half dozen or so of Modiano's other books. Now that he won a Nobel Prize, they are beginning to come out in good and even excellent translations, so that should be fun.

When Modiano was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature this year (2014), not many of his novels were available in English translation. I quickly acquired as many as were available (either in ebook or paperback formats) and began working my way through them. "Honeymoon" was the second I read and it conformed wonderfully to the noted essence of what Modiano has been so acclaimed for. He seems to specialize in short private-investigator-type novels in which a protagonist (the investigator) endeavors to uncover what really happened in the lives of (mostly furtive) persons he has come across in the past, with the end result -- as opposed to the established PI genre -- being nothing but loose ends. No resolution to the search other then the keen perceptions and ultimate wisdom gained through the search itself. A deeply satisfying read.

This book is superbly written. It is the first Modiano book I have read, and I'm impressed by the author. The ending of the book is a bit inconclusive, but overall I found this book to be masterfully written and creative.

Modiano is one of the most elegant writers imaginable. He never looks at the thing directly, but always from an angle. You must read the book at least twice to appreciate its artistry and power. And this reading is a marvel, although, on the picky side. the narrator skips the penultimate page of the novel, thus leading to an abrupt and confounding ending. (He probably turned two pages instead of one as he was recording the final part of the book, alas.)

Did not like it at all. Difficult to follow.

I was expecting this book to be paperback, but I got a hard copy, to my surprise! For the price that I paid, this order is a great bargain.

With "Honrymoon" alone there would not have been any prize from the Nobel Foundation for Mondiano. It is an early Tome and arguably are his later books like "Black Notebook" much better.Peter Andersson

Classic Modiano. Beautiful and sad. Wonderful.

Interesting writing