Missing Person

Guy Roland has spent years working for a private detective agency in Paris run by a man named Hutte, chasing down other people's missing relatives and old debts, when Hutte retires and leaves the agency to him. Roland has no memory of his own life before he began that work, and Patrick Modiano turns the detective's methods back on their own practitioner: Roland starts investigating himself, following the same faint trail of photographs, addresses and half remembering witnesses he would once have used to trace someone else's missing person.

The trail leads him to believe he may once have been a man named Jimmy Pedro Stern, of Greek Jewish background, from Salonica, who lived under an assumed identity in occupied Paris and worked for the Dominican Republic's legation there during the war. It leads further to a woman, Denise Coudreuse, and to an attempt by a small group, Roland among them, to cross into Switzerland during the occupation, an escape a paid smuggler abandoned them to partway through in the mountains. Roland's search takes him even further afield, to Bora Bora chasing a friend named Freddie, and finally to an address on the Via delle Botteghe Oscure in Rome, the last lead the novel gives him.

Modiano never hands Roland, or the reader, a confirmed answer. The novel's own governing image, that the sand holds the traces of our footsteps for only a few moments, argues the uncertainty is the point rather than an unfinished plot. Reading it means accepting a detective story that refuses the genre's usual payoff, more interested in how identity dissolves under wartime occupation than in solving anything cleanly. It suits a reader drawn to spare, quietly haunted prose about Paris under occupation, comfortable with a mystery that stays a mystery.