The Black Notebook

In his latest, published in France in 2012, Nobel Prize winner Modiano does what he does best: in settings that seem to rise from the mists of the Seine, he explores the limits of memory and the slipperiness of both past and present. Following Algeria's war of independence, a young writer named Jean wanders through Paris, eventually falling in love with the mysterious Danny. He needs persistence because Danny is evasive, shifting residences, picking up her mail at general delivery, and clearly using a pseudonym. She's also linked to a bunch of shady characters who seem to have committed a singular crime, and Jean soon finds himself being interviewed by a detective. Years later, with the help of a notebook Jean kept, Jean tries to reconstruct this time in his life, with incomplete success. The crime, suggested by the 1965 kidnapping of a North African political activist, is referenced in just a few scenes, which is both galling and precisely the point; as Modiano always reveals, our understanding of circumstances can be tangential at best.