Sundays in August

Sundays in August, sunning on the beach in Brittany, are calm and peaceful. They are the exception. The rest of life, or at least the lives of our principal characters, is anxiety-filled, not knowing if retribution for past crimes is more likely than current threats. And always there is uncertainty over whether the Southern Cross diamond is their salvation or their doom. Sylvia is inclined to the former view, Jean suspects the latter. They can’t both be right.

Patrick Modiano weaves another atmospheric drama out of reminiscence and regret. And a certain, possibly implausible, device of faulty memory. When Sylvia’s ex-husband discovers the pair in Nice, it isn’t his potential indignation that has them worried. He is just a harbinger show more of worse things to come. But from which direction?

It’s a brief read but very taut and there is a wonderful appearance of Sylvia’s mother-in-law, in flashback, towards the end. Now she would have been a compelling character to build a thriller around!

Easily recommended. show less

Sundays in August embodies the dreamy quality of a memory from the past, but a beguiling memory with a hint of danger, and told with scintillating detail. Then a mystery emerges from the past, hints of which have been dropped in place throughout the story, and dreaminess gives way to something more sinister.

As in many of Modiano's stories, one man is left to unravel what details he can and try to make sense of what went on in the past, in this case his own. Of interest, the title is the last three words of the novel.

Hypnotic, ambiguous, this is a slow-burner of a book that plays with your mind; Modiano is a master of place and he builds a complex narrative that weaves back through time to slowly reveal essential parts of the plot. If you like your books neatly tied up with string and signed off with everything explained, this is not for you. It's complex and makes the reader have to work to try and figure out answers, but in a beautifully languid, almost dreamlike way. A different setting from his normal Paris-based books, I really enjoyed it.

His best? No... A little too light. And yet fiction that breezes page to page, more like cinema than work. This one of a couple in Nice, of unclear origins except that they have a secret. The secret involves a diamond that must be moved. There is pensiveness, a missing purpose, a narrator who knows his biography but not his purpose. So enjoyable to read...

Whenever I pick up a book by this author, before I even open and start reading the first page, I am already thinking, film noir. Shadowy figures, low lighted, foggy streets, cafes and imagining everything in black and white. Two figures, either two men, or a man snd woman, something in their past that has blended into their future, something discovered, lost or unfinished. An atmosphere that lends itself to suspense, but not the kind that shouts at you, the kind that is subtle, but leaving one with the sense that there is more to be uncovered.

So it is with this novel, starts in the present, two men who were aquaintinted in the past, concerning a woman, but how are they acquainted and who is the women? We travel to the past where step show more by step the story is told. A story that includes an infamous necklace from the distant past, and a mystery that was never solved.

Madiano has a way with words, words to create an atmosphere that is enticing, a even a bit forboding. It is never just the story, but the whole experience, the whole package, like scenes in a movie. One can just picture them when reading his books, and I always enjoy them just enough. show less

I loved SUNDAYS IN AUGUST by Patrick Modiano, the French writer who recently won the Nobel Prize for Literature. As my readers know, I like place and setting in a novel. While most of Modiano's fiction is set in Paris this book is set in Nice where I live part of the year. So all the sites are familiar. They are the streets I walk again and again. This story is also different from most of Modiano in that it is a mystery of sorts which centers on the great diamond, the Southern Cross.Such a large stone can only lead to misery as it does here. I strongly recommend this novel as well as Modiano as a writer. I have read many of his books.

A slow moving, triste, majestic pace. Very atmospheric. Fraught with regrets.