Read by Bronson Pinchot

In this strange, elegant novel, Patrick Modiano portrays a man in pursuit of the identity he lost in the murky days of the Paris Occupation, the black hole of French memory. For ten years Guy Roland has lived without a past. His current life and name were given to him by his recently retired boss, Hutte, who welcomed him, a one-time client, into his detective agency. Guy makes full use of Hutte's files-directories, yearbooks, and papers of all kinds going back half a century-but leads to his former life are few. Could he really be that person in a photograph, a young man remembered by some as a South American attaché? Or was he someone else, perhaps the disappeared scion of a prominent local family? He interviews strangers and is tantalized by half-clues until, at last, he grasps a thread that leads him through a maze of his own repressed experience. On one level Missing Person is a detective thriller, a 1950s, film noir mix of smoky cafés, illegal passports, and insubstantial figures crossing bridges in the fog. On another level it is also a haunting meditation on the nature of the self. Modiano's spare, hypnotic prose, superbly translated by Daniel Weissbort, draws listeners into the intoxication of a rare literary experience. "The best place to fling oneself into Mr. Modiano's oeuvre." "Delicate and cunning…Modiano's method is to sidle up to subjects of mystery and horror, indicating them without broaching them, as if gingerly fingering the outside of a poison bottle…He opens dark doors into the past out of a sunlit present." "Beautifully written and perfectly noirish, as though the world were being seen through a haze of Gauloise smoke. Be warned, though: after reading this, a sensitive soul may well seize up the next time a stranger waves." "[An] elliptical, engrossing rumination on the essence of identity and the search for self." "Moody, atmospheric, and dreamlike, this novel follows conventions of both noir fiction and ghost stories but can be read on many levels."

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