“The more things remain obscure and mysterious, the more they interest me. I even try to find mystery in things that have none.” – Patrick Modiano.

He doesn’t know either. Or rather, what he does know, he shares with us in a series of novels that have the kind of atmosphere that one finds in the darkest corners of noir films.What we do know is that he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

He claims he was happiest when walking on his own in the streets of Paris as a teenager. The haunting, melancholy atmosphere of the old working-class quartiers, their cafes, garages, run-down hotels and seedy nightclubs, the dreamlike labyrinth of boulevards, streets, squares, Métro stations, are combined in his novels with echoes of Modiano’s broken and unhappy childhood. A curious cast of mysterious and frequently sinister characters, glimpsed as if in a mist, appear and vanish from his narratives for no reason. Just like Modiano himself.

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