"There were two entrances to the café, but she always opted for the narrower one hidden in the shadows."

Paris, 1950s. We're inside a café called Condé. Bohemian youth and some older men form the crowd of this Condé, where our central character walks in. She's a young lady, mysterious, elegant and awkwardly quiet in her ways. The regulars at the café call her Louki, but no one apparently knows her real name.



Where did Louki come from? What was her past like? What is with this enigma surrounding her? It appears that no one really knows.

In the Café of Lost Youth is a glimpse into post-war France, when celebrations and parties are galore. Bohemians come up with fresh perspectives and ideologies to define the new times. We walk among drunks, shady detectives, gangsters and junkies. We drift from alley to alley, walking along the streets of a Paris long lost in time. The story constantly reminds us of the cruel hand time plays to our urban souvenirs. Cafés and apartments lost in time, replaced by new shops and labels without a trace from their past. An ephemera of urban existence.



The story is told from the perspectives of four different narrators, each of them with their own degree of mystery. Louki is one of the narrators, recounting chapters of her past with a certain vagueness that continues the foggy train of thought of the novel.

"In this life that sometimes seems to be a vast, ill-defined landscape without signposts, amid all of the vanishing lines and the lost horizons, we hope to find reference points, to draw up some sort of land registry so as to shake the impression that we are navigating by chance. So we forge ties, we try to find stability in chance encounters."

The story explores a theme where every character's journey is essential marked with a start and and end point with many such reference points in between. The story also explains a concept of "neutral" zones.

"There was a series of transitional zones in Paris, no-man’s-lands where we were on the border of everything else, in transit, or even held suspended. Within, we benefited from a certain kind of immunity."

These zones are continuously referred to, along with references to Nietzche's Eternal Recurrence, giving a notion that our fates are inescapable. As usual, Modiano brings Paris to life in his story, writing about it like a living, breathing mechanism where the lifeblood are the people, the characters drifting throughout time.