Dans le café de la jeunesse perdue is a novel by Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano (born in 1945), published in 2007. The book describes the life of a mysterious and runaway woman, Louki, from the point of views of various characters that she encountered. Her life and stroll across Paris in the 1950’s and 1960’s is recounted through the memories she left behind : a troubled childhood, a failed marriage and a life in the streets grasping for a new life. Patrick Modiano compiles fragmented stories and murky memories in order to describe a passing but beautiful figure. 

With Modiano, the reader travels to a Paris that is both familiar and unknown, to places on the edge or on the margins. We read this book together during the first months of COVID-19 in the spring of 2020, in a very special atmosphere. We talked a lot about these anonymous, discreet and self-effacing existences that circulate in the heart of our daily life and in the shadow of big cities. A dark but beautiful adventure, made of traces left that only writing can recapture.

We read this book in the summer of 2020.