The Black Notebook, Patrick Modiano
The Black Notebook, Patrick Modiano
List: $16.95 | Sale: $11.87
Club: $8.47

The Black Notebook

Author: Patrick Modiano, Mark Polizzotti

Narrator: Bronson Pinchot

Unabridged: 3 hr 33 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/27/2016

Synopsis

A writer’s notebook becomes the key that unlocks memories of a love formed and lost in 1960s Paris.In the aftermath of Algeria’s war of independence, Paris was a city rife with suspicion and barely suppressed violence. Amid this tension, Jean, a young writer adrift, met and fell for Dannie, an enigmatic woman fleeing a troubled past. Half a century later, with his old black notebook as a guide, Jean retraces this fateful period in his life, recounting how, through Dannie, he became mixed up with a group of unsavory characters connected by a shadowy crime. Soon Jean too was a person of interest to the detective pursuing their case—a detective who would prove instrumental in revealing Dannie’s darkest secret. The Black Notebook bears all the hallmarks of this Nobel Prize–winning literary master’s unsettling and intensely atmospheric style, rendered in English by acclaimed translator Mark Polizzotti. Once again, Modiano invites us into his unique world, a Paris infused with melancholy, uncertain danger, and the fading echoes of lost love.

About Patrick Modiano

Patrick Modiano is a bestselling novelist and the winner of some of the most prestigious literary awards in France, including the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Mondial Cino Del Duca for lifetime achievement. In 2014 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for “the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation.”

About Mark Polizzotti

Mark Polizzotti has translated numerous books from the French, including works by André Breton, Jean Echenoz, Marguerite Duras, and Gustave Flaubert. He is the author of Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton; a collection of poems, The New Life; and the collaborative novel S. He lives in Massachusetts.

About Bronson Pinchot

Bronson Pinchot, Audible’s Narrator of the Year for 2010, has won Publishers Weekly Listen-Up Awards, AudioFile Earphones Awards, Audible’s Book of the Year Award, and Audie Awards for several audiobooks, including Matterhorn, Wise Blood, Occupied City, and The Learners. A magna cum laude graduate of Yale, he is an Emmy- and People’s Choice-nominated veteran of movies, television, and Broadway and West End shows. His performance of Malvolio in Twelfth Night was named the highlight of the entire two-year Kennedy Center Shakespeare Festival by the Washington Post. He attended the acting programs at Shakespeare & Company and Circle-in-the-Square, logged in well over 200 episodes of television, starred or costarred in a bouquet of films, plays, musicals, and Shakespeare on Broadway and in London, and developed a passion for Greek revival architecture.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Jim

The author won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2014 and the Prix Goncourt. A man whom we assume is now in his 70’s looks back on his life as a student in Paris in the 1960’s. He attended the City University and his girlfriend at the time involved him in a life of mysteries. Fifty years later he’s s......more

Goodreads review by Blair

(Review originally published on my blog, February 2016) I hadn't planned for such a recent translation to be the first Modiano I read, but its appearance on my local library's 'New Books' shelf was irresistible. In the end, I consumed this brief, hallucinatory novel in one gulp. Within its pages is a......more

Goodreads review by Emilio

Notturno a Parigi "Per me non c'è mai stato nè presente né passato. Tutto si confonde" . Uno scrittore percorre le strade di Parigi, con molti ricordi risalenti a decenni prima, agli anni '60, ai suoi vent'anni. Tra le varie figure, ormai poco più che fantasmi di un ambiente equivoco, spicca l'immagin......more

Goodreads review by SARAH

"دلم برای انهایی میسوخت که باید در یادداشت های روزانه شان کلی قرار ملاقات ثبت کنند،بعضی شان را از دو ماه قبل.همه چیز برایشان ازپیش تعیین شده بود واحتمالا هیچ گاه منتظر کسی نبودند.احتمالا هیچ گاه نمی فهمیدند که زمان می تپد،وسعت یافته،بعد دوباره ارام میشود وکم کم ان احساس رهایی و بیکرانگی را به شما می......more

Quotes

“Bronson Pinchot elegantly narrates this mysterious novella. His fine French accent gives this brooding backward-glancing story by Nobel Prize winner Modiano a fine sense of time and place…Pinchot’s nuanced narration of this brief work brings the listener into the complex past via Jean’s black notebook…The energized Parisian street life of the 1960s is almost a character itself.” AudioFile

“1960s Paris, a mysterious girl, a group of shady characters, danger…and sheer magic follows.” Vogue

“Ex-convicts, missing bullets, a detective with a long memory…carefully wrought and superbly fluid.” Le Monde (Paris)

“The prose—elliptical, muted, eloquent—falls on the reader like an enchantment…No one is currently writing such beautiful tales of loss, melancholy, and remembrance.” Independent (London)

“[A] magnificent novel that reawakens days long past, illuminating them with a dazzling light.” Elle (France)

“Pure Modiano…It’s the strange atmosphere between the lines that makes the magic.” Le Figaro (Paris)

“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.” Library Journal (starred review)

“A short but potent novel that’s as elegant as Claude Rains and as sinister as Peter Lorre…An atmospheric, smoky, sepia-toned whodunit.” Kirkus Reviews

Add to Cart
Add to Wish List