In the Café of Lost Youth
In the Café of Lost Youth opens in the Condé café in Paris in the 1950s. The narrator of the opening chapter, a student in his early twenties, introduces us to some of the café’s regulars, men and women of varying ages who all seem to be adrift. We learn their names and only a sentence or two about who they are. There are no physical descriptions and none are needed because everyone here is temporary, found family, and all will drift apart before we can become too attached.
We soon come to learn that Paris itself in these postwar years is, like the patrons of the Condé, undergoing constant change in directions no one can quite predict. It’s not the same city it was a few years ago, and it won’t be the same a few years hence. Neighborhood landmarks disappear, taking with them the flavor a world irretrievably past. “And if this whole period still endures in my memory,” the narrator says, “it’s because of questions that have remained unanswered.”
The initial narrator’s main focus is Louki, a woman of twenty-one who prefers to slip in through the café’s dark side door and tends to listen without talking. He mentions that one of the café’s regulars, a man named Bowing, kept a book in which he noted “the names of the Condé’s customers as they arrived, in each instance jotting down the date and exact time… It was as if Bowing were trying to save butterflies around a lamp from being forgotten. He envisioned a great register where the names of the customers of all the cafés of Paris were recorded, with notes made of their successive arrivals and departures. He was haunted by what he called ‘fixed points.’”
The narrator of the second chapter is a detective who happens into the Condé in search of Louki. From him, we learn her real name and a little bit about who she is. The detective, whom we sense has seen a lot in his former life as a police officer, states most clearly and directly the conflicting sentiments of the postwar era that Modiano is attempting to document in a style that is at once verbally spare and impressionistically rich.
Attempting to distance himself from the people and memories of his past, the detective notes, “We live at the mercy of certain silences. We have all known things about each other for a long time. So we try to avoid each other.” This is the centrifugal tendency of wanting to flee from what keeps pulling you back in time.
Later in the same chapter, the detective notes the opposite tendency that affects both him and the subjects of his investigations. “In this life that sometimes seems to be a vast, ill-defined landscape without signposts, amid all of the vanishing lines and lost horizons, we hope to find reference points, to draw up some sort of land registry so as to shake the impression that we are navigating by chance. So we forge ties, we try to find stability in chance encounters.”
Louki herself narrates the third chapter. We learn something of her adolescence, which was governed by a sense of anomie. If some of her decisions seem perplexing, it’s because there is no anchor to her existence, no guiding principle or value. It’s impossible for any writer to convey this clearly in succinct prose, the way you might convey that a certain character was driven by greed or ambition. Modiano simply provides a series of impressions about his character’s life, and from those the reader, like the detective, intuits an understanding of Louki’s shapelessness.
In her we see the lack of fixed points that haunted Bowing in chapter one, the silences, the vanishing lines and lost horizons, the landscape without signposts that haunted the detective. She is the human embodiment of the shifting city that the drifting characters inhabit. We understand by the end of the chapter that she is unknowable because, with no fixed points around which to construct an identity, she does not know herself.
She has no sense at all of where she’s going or what she wants. All Louki really seems to understand about herself is that, like the detective, she would like to avoid her past, which fills her with a vague, unnameable discomfort that sometimes triggers panic attacks. She avoids her past by avoiding the neighborhood in which she grew up and its landmarks, like the Canter, the first café in which she spent any real time. “There are certain invisible boundaries in our lives,” she says. “And yet, the first few times I went to the Condé, I was quite surprised to recognize one of the customers I had seen at the Cantor.”
The narrator of final chapter is Louki’s lover, Roland, another young man adrift, who is compiling a book about Paris’ “neutral zones.” These are the regions at the peripheries of the arrondisements that don’t seem to fit in with the rest of the neighborhood. You can be in any one of these zones without knowing what part of the city you are in. They are often crowded with apartments offering furnished rooms on month-to-month leases to those who have no definite furniture, no past they’d like to own, whose lives are permanently in transition. Roland’s book begins, “Neutral Zones have at least one advantage: They are only a starting point and we always leave them sooner or later.”
Leave them for what? There’s no answer to that question. And from what do people come to these neutral zones? From a past that is only defined by the characters’ desire to get away from it.
There seems to be no time in the world Louki and Roland inhabit. They wander lost in the city they grew up in and should know well. They walk with no particular destination, and they seem always just about to embark on a journey that never happens. Like the narrator of the opening chapter, Roland’s recollections are driven by unanswered questions.
He reflects as he walks the streets of Paris years after the Condé has disappeared, “I had been certain that we were so alike, she and I, because we could often read each other’s minds. We were on the same wavelength. Born the same year and the same month. And yet, believe it or not, there must have been a fundamental difference between us.”
All Roland has left to make sense of this past is a statement from his and Louki’s mutual friend, Guy de Vere. “There’s nothing to understand. When we really love someone, we’ve got to accept their role in the mystery. And that’s why we love them. Isn’t it, Roland?”
This is a haunting book told in resonating, impressionistic prose that captures elements of life and place that can be felt but not known. At 118 pages, you can read it in a single day, but it will stay with you long after.