WINNER OF THE 2014 NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE
Jean B., the narrator of Honeymoon, is submerged in the world where night and day, past and present, have no demarcations. Having spent his entire adult life making documentary movies about lost explorers, Jean suddenly decides to abandon his wife and his career, and takes what seems to be a journey to nowhere. He spends his solitary days recounting or imagining the lives of Ingrid and Rigaud, a refugee couple he met more than twenty years ago. Little by little, their story takes on more reality than Jean’s existence, as his excavation of the past slowly becomes an all-encompassing obsession.
In Honeymoon, Patrick Modiano constructs an existential tale of suspense and longing, and of the past’s hold over a shifting, ambiguous present. Barbara Wright’s translation remains true to Modiano’s simple, melodious prose of a born storyteller. In the words of Le Monde, this novel truly shows “a magician at work.” Jacques-Pierre Amette of Le Point called Modiano, “Possibly the best witness of our generation, and the most ruthless.”
Honeymoon is the first book in the Verba Mundi series which offers the best in modern world literature—whether by such established masters as Cesare Pavese and Georges Perec, or by some of the world’s younger talented writers, these books are meant to invite adventurous readers to partake in a diversity of cultures and enhance our appreciation of the world in which we live.
A beautiful example of Modiano’s fluid storytelling.
—BooklistHaunting, ambiguous, and more universal than one might expect… [Honeymoon] is shaped by the imperfections and subjectivity of knowledge, and by WWII, the black hole of French memory.
—Publishers Weekly