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    Villa Triste
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    Villa Triste
    Unavailable
    Villa Triste
    Ebook165 pages3 hours

    Villa Triste

    By Patrick Modiano

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    What was I doing, at the age of eighteen, on the shore of that lake, in that fashionable spa resort? Nothing.

    At the outbreak of the Algerian war, a young man who calls himself Victor Chmara flees Paris for a small lakeside town on the border of France and Switzerland.

    It’s here that he meets the flamboyant doctor René Meinthe and the mysterious auburn-haired Yvonne. Victor quickly embraces their world of pageants, soirées and late-night debauchery, and settles into an endless summer with Yvonne.

    But René and Yvonne’s lives are also full of unanswered questions and half-truths. As he looks back years later, Victor remains beguiled by those lost, unknowable friends and the enchanted place he chose to leave behind.

    One of Modiano’s most elegiac and haunting novels, Villa Triste is an intoxicating investigation into time, place, identity, and memory.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDaunt Books
    Release dateAug 25, 2016
    ISBN9781907970948
    Unavailable
    Villa Triste
    Author

    Patrick Modiano

    PATRICK MODIANO was born in 1945 in a suburb of Paris and grew up in various locations throughout France. In 1967, he published his first novel, La Place de l'étoile, to great acclaim. Since then, he has published over twenty novels—including the Goncourt Prize−winning Rue des boutiques obscures (translated as Missing Person), Dora Bruder, and Les Boulevards des ceintures (translated as Ring Roads)—as well as the memoir Un Pedigree and a children's book, Catherine Certitude. He collaborated with Louis Malle on the screenplay for the film Lacombe Lucien. In 2014, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy cited “the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the Occupation,” calling him “a Marcel Proust of our time.”

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    Reviews for Villa Triste

    3.5/5

    54 ratings4 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Unlike much of Modiano's works, this is not set in Paris. It's set in 1960 at an unnamed French lakeside resort near the Swiss border (Lac d'Annecy, perhaps). The protagonist, Victor, is a stateless young man (Russian?) who meets up with a mysterious woman and her even more mysterious friend. Everything is Modiano vague; forgotten names, faces, places. Although Victor is not in Paris, he is constantly comparing streets, bars, houses to those he remembers from Paris. Along with Modiano vague, we have Modiano specific: street names, details of furniture, clothing, cars.
    • 5/5
      A young man known as Victor Chmara (“the name I used on the registration form”) flees Paris to a lake town in France, close to Switzerland. It’s hard to tell what he fears, but wants to be able to escape to the traditionally neutral country if necessary. “I didn’t know yet that Switzerland doesn’t exist,” he says. He meets a slightly older woman named Yvonne, with a melancholy Great Dane, and her friend – a doctor named Meinthe. They also appear to be running – from their pedestrian roots. With no one being exactly who they say it’s no surprise that there’s no clean resolution or break when the time comes. This story has a wartime feel, with imminent danger lingering about the edges, but takes place in the early 1960s.
    • 5/5
      odiano has a melancholic bent whose sentences vibrate (“like a spider’s web”) with a kind of menace. We are never really sure who deserves the most scrutiny amongst his characters, but everyone in this novel seems to be hiding some dark past or grim present. Even the dog, a Great Dane, was “congenitally afflicted with sadness and the ennui of life.” In Modiano's lavish description of the locale, a fashionable small French resort across a lake from Switzerland, even the trees are a mystery:"The vegetation here is thoroughly mixed, it’s hard to tell if you’re in the Alps, on the shores of the Mediterranean, or somewhere in the tropics. Umbrella pines. Mimosas. Fir trees. Palms. If you take the boulevard up the hillside, you discover the panorama: the entire lake, the Aravis mountains, and across the water, the elusive country known as Switzerland."Why “elusive”? We never learn why. “I didn’t yet know that Switzerland doesn’t exist.” Perhaps it is the notion of safety that doesn’t exist. A nineteen-year-old is not expected to know that, not then, not now. Modiano liberally salts his work with phrases that fill us with an unnameable dread. Count Victor is no more Count than you or I, but somehow we’d rather believe that than whatever it is he is running from. He is the son of Russian Jews, and the Second World War is over at least fifteen years. He is wealthy beyond imagining, but he has fear: he’s “scared to death” he tells us early on as he recounts the time he met Yvonne and Meinthe.”When I think of her today, that’s the image that comes back to me most often. Her smile and her red hair. The black-and-white dog beside her. The beige Dodge. And Meinthe, barely visible behind the windshield. And the switched-on headlights. And the rays of the sun.”Modiano writes like a painter paints. He weaves sound and scent along with color and emotion, light and dark.”We returned through a part of the garden I wasn’t familiar with. The gravel paths were rectilinear, the lawns symmetrical and laid out in picturesque English style. Around each of them were flamboyant beds of begonias or geraniums. And here as well, there was the soft, reassuring whisper of the sprinklers. I thought about the Tuileries of my childhood. Meinthe proposed that we have a drink…In the end, the three of them, The Count, Yvonne, and Meinthe make quite a hit in that town at that time. Photographs show them glamorous and solemn, walking arm-in-arm beside the dog, Meinthe taking up the rear. Meinthe and Yvonne win the coveted Houligant Cup for that year and are sought-after companions for their edgy stylishness. Gradually Meinthe and Yvonne share pieces of their shadowy background with Victor, and the glamour, he realizes, is all rhinestones and rust.“The rooms in 'palaces' fool you at first, but pretty soon their dreary walls and furniture begin to exude the same sadness as the accommodations in shady hotels. Insipid luxury; sickly sweet smell in the corridors, which I can’t identify but must be the very odor of anxiety, of instability, of exile, of phoniness.”When “France suddenly seemed to [Victor] too narrow a territory,” he proposed they ditch the local act and take to the road, somewhere where they could show their true capabilities…America. Later, when it is all over, we think that perhaps Victor’s fear stems from his youth, his aloneness, his uncertainty. He grew up that summer by the lake, and saw most of what there was to see. Later, when he ambles under the arcades on the Rue de Castiglione reading a newspaper, his education comes full circle, and the mystery begins again.Promotional copy for Villa Triste, due out today in a new translation by John Cullen and published by Other Press, calls it Modiano’s most accessible novel. It may well be, but all Modiano’s great themes are present. This fine translation does justice to the underlying greatness of the work. A fine piece of literature that can keep you mulling events over in your head for a long time to come.
    • 3/5
      Villa Triste is a very French-film-voice-over sort of novel: full of ambiguities and unresolved hints, mournful in a vague sort of way, infatuated with the American chic of the Great Gatsby era, heavily laden with adjectives and visual description. We never learn the narrator's real name or what he is running away from, or even the name of the resort-town where he is hiding out (as far as the last two go, "conscription" and "Annecy" are strongly hinted at, but never confirmed). We know from the start that there's not going to be a happy ending, and indeed the narrator makes it clear that he doesn't know, and apparently hasn't made much effort to find out, how all the threads of the story came out. What the book really seems to be about is the problem of how we are constrained in life by our origins. The narrator is someone whose background is clearly as romantically complicated as Modiano's own, and who would like nothing more than to come from somewhere and have a nice, safe, bourgeois family to escape from; Yvonne is the classic small-town girl who wants to be a big star but doesn't quite have the drive to get away from her provincial comfort-zone (think Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly); René is the effete gay man who has to deal with his father's reputation as a great war hero (even in 1975, Modiano could probably have got away with making him slightly less of a homophobic caricature). Interesting, charming, beautifully written, but somehow it all feels incredibly old-fashioned. More 1920s than 1970s, really.