Name: Villa
Triste
Author: Patrick Modiano
First Published: September 1975
This Edition Published: May 2016
Publisher: Daunt Books
This dusky-looking item was a true impulse buy. I was aimlessly browsing a bookshop one lunchtime about a year ago looking for something a bit different. I was enticed by Villa Triste, with its shiny, golden title hovering over a musty, broken
and abandoned house with a beautiful lakeside view.
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| The faded glamour of Patrick Modiano's Villa Triste |
man who seems, at times, wise beyond his years.
Victor Chmara (if that is his real name) has fled from who-knows-where to the safe haven of a French town on the edge of a Swiss lake. He lives in fear, for reasons that are never entirely revealed, yet feels safe in the knowledge that he could cross the lake to Switzerland
if trouble ever catches up with him.
Sitting in a hotel one evening, Victor meets two charming people: the up-and-coming actress, Yvonne Jacquet, and her eccentric friend, René Meinthe. And so begins a friendship that takes him to debauched parties and expensive hotels.
But his new friends keep him at arm’s length, and
their existence provokes more questions than they themselves answer. Where does their money come from? Where have they come from? Where does René disappear at night? And why does the phone keep ringing in the empty Villa Triste? The town they live in, at first so glamorous, begins to feel shallow, corrupt and dirty as the source of the mystery becomes apparent.
But his new friends keep him at arm’s length, and
their existence provokes more questions than they themselves answer. Where does their money come from? Where have they come from? Where does René disappear at night? And why does the phone keep ringing in the empty Villa Triste? The town they live in, at first so glamorous, begins to feel shallow, corrupt and dirty as the source of the mystery becomes apparent.
The book opens years later, as Victor views the dilapidated town from a bus window. Villa Triste pays close attention to deeply-held feelings and
atmospheres that simmer just below the surface. It captures the haze
of memory, the holes where things have been forgotten and the rosy tints we apply to the past. It also paints a character who doesn't quite understand the power plays and
complicated relationships happening around him. All of these elements come together to create a perfectly haunting, mysterious and atmospheric read.
Patrick
Modiano won the Nobel prize for literature in 2014 and you can buy Villa Triste
from Daunt Books.
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