Villa Triste

An elliptical narrative with a submerged past and memory shifting like smoke, this story has all the hallmarks of Nobel Prize winner Modiano's writing. But with more details forthrightly given and a franker sense of the erotic, it is refreshingly different, too. In the early Sixties, a restless young man who calls himself Count Victor Chmara hides out in a fashionable French resort town on a lake near Switzerland. What he's hiding from remains uncertain, though brief reference is made to the ongoing Algerian War and shadowy events in prewar Berlin. Soon he's linked up with aspiring actress Yvonne Jacquet and Dr. René Meinthe, an older friend of hers whose sexual proclivities briefly touch the narrative's surface. This mysteriously wealthy twosome invites the young man to leave his dowdy boardinghouse and move into their elegant abode, and he pursues an increasingly heated affair with Yvonne. Suddenly, it all falls away, and our young hero is left with questions while remaining a question mark himself.