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Missing Person- Available April 2025

Missing Person- Available April 2025

2025 Edition

by Patrick Modiano
Translated by Daniel Weissbort

Regular price $18.95 USD
Regular price Sale price $18.95 USD
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Format

Product Details

Verba Mundi

Softcover
ISBN: 978-1-56792-829-7
Pages: 192
Size: 5.5" x 8.5"
Published: April 2025
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An amnesic searches for his identity, from Polynesia to Rome, in this novel by master storyteller Patrick Modiano: winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

Guy Roland is in pursuit of the identity he lost in the murky days of the Paris Occupation. For ten years, he has lived without a past. His current life and name were given to him by his recently retired boss, Hutte, who welcomed him, a onetime client, into his detective agency. Guy makes full use of Hutte’s files—directories, yearbooks, and papers of all kinds going back half a century—but his leads are few. Could he really be the person in that photograph, a young man remembered by some as a South American attaché? Or was he someone else, perhaps the disappeared scion of a prominent local family? He interviews strangers and is tantalized by half-clues until, at last, he grasps a thread that leads him through the maze of his own repressed experience.

Published in France as Rue des Boutiques obscures this is both a detective mystery and a haunting meditation on the nature of the self, Patrick Modiano’s spare, hypnotic prose, superbly translated by Daniel Weissbort, draws readers into the intoxication of a rare literary experience.

Click here for the 2005 edition of Missing Person, available at a 30% discount!

Praise for Missing Person

Winner of the Prix Goncourt, France’s premier literary prize

“Delicate and cunning. . . Modiano’s method is to sidle up to subjects of mystery and horror, indicating them without broaching them, as if gingerly fingering the outside of a poison bottle. . . he opens dark doors into the past out of a sunlit present.”—Times Literary Supplement

Missing Person has the pace and economy of a good crime novel, but it also has an allegorical heft, suggesting that modern France’s own identity lies somewhere in the fog of Occupation.”—New York Review of Books

Patrick Modiano
Patrick Modiano was born near Paris 1945. He was awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature. His works in English include Catherine Certitude (Godine, 1993), Missing Person (Godine, 2005) for which he won the Prix Goncourt in 1978, A Trace of Malice, and the screenplay Lacombe Lucien (with Louis Malle).

Daniel Weissbort
Daniel Weissbort was born in London and educated at Cambridge, where he was a History Exhibitioner. In 1965, with Ted Hughes, he founded the magazine Modern Poetry in Translation (MPT) which he edited for almost forty years. He also directed the Translation Workshop and MFA Program in Translation at the University of Iowa for over thirty years. In addition to his translations, Daniel Weissbort published many collections of his own poetry, co-edited a historical reader in translation theory, and wrote a book about the translator Ted Hughes.