‘Missing Person’ by Patrick Modiano (translated by Daniel Weissbort)

Fiction – paperback; Penguin Modern Classics; 176 pages; 2019. Translated from the French by Daniel Weissbort.

Are we the product of our past? Or is it how we lead our lives now that forms our identity?

These are the questions at the heart of Patrick Modiano’s Missing Person, originally published in French as Rue des Boutiques Obscures (which means “The Street of Dark Shops”) in 1978 and translated into English by Daniel Weissbort in 1980. Modiano, of course, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2014; this novel earned him the Prix Goncourt literary prize in the year of publication.

In this languid, dreamlike tale (easily read in one or two sittings), a detective, plagued by amnesia for almost 20 years, tries to establish his own identity when the agency he works for shuts down. Now, with time on his hands, Guy Roland can investigate his past, to work out who he was before he lost his memory.

With just an old photograph to guide him on his way, Guy’s inquiries lead him on a long, winding trail of clues right back to the Second World War. (The book is set in 1965.) Throughout, it’s never clear if his research is reliable or not. He begins to imagine that every new name he unearths in documents or via hearsay or through conversations with “witnesses” may, in fact, be him.

Is it really my life I’m tracking down? Or someone else’s into which I have somehow infiltrated myself?

His quest takes him from Paris to Rome and later ends on the South Pacific Island of Bora Bora. Along the way, he begins to establish a vast array of key figures from his past life, including Russian immigrants, bartenders, a pianist, a jockey, a Hollywood actor and a French model likely to have been his girlfriend.

Clues suggest he may have been a diplomatic minister for the Dominican Republic and that he used this identity to escape the German Occupation of Paris during the war. But maybe he is just imagining it. The lines between what is real and what is not constantly shift and change and blur to the point of being indistinguishable.

The book’s economical prose style and the careful moving forward of the plot largely through dialogue makes this a fast-paced read, part detective thriller, part literary mystery.

The recurring motifs — a billiard table, a black-and-white photograph, a taxi and snatches of tunes – lend the narrative a gentle, hypnotic quality as Guy’s quest inches ever closer to the truth.

Missing Person is an excellent, thought-provoking look at memory, human connections, experience and our search for meaning. It doesn’t provide easy answers — plot spoiler: nothing is neatly tied up at the end — and so it’s up to the reader to figure out what happened and whether the past, lost in a “black hole”, is as important as Guy believes it to be.