"Eugène Atget photographed Paris from 1888 until his death in 1927. Like many people, I consider him the greatest photographer of all time. He docu
"Eugène Atget photographed Paris from 1888 until his death in 1927. Like many people, I consider him the greatest photographer of all time. He documented the city in a straightforward way, his images evoking the feeling that all the transitory things that people make, all the things they do, are washed away, leaving only their transcendent evidence."
-Preface by Christopher Rauschenberg
A touching tribute to a great photographer Paris Changing contains seventy-four pairs of images beautifully reproduced in duotone. Each pair having one photograph by Atget, and the other by Rauschenberg. Each site is indicated on a map of the city, inviting readers to follow in the steps of Atget and Rauschenberg themselves.
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"In Paris that year, in the streets and places that Atget had admired, I resolved to return and explore with my camera whether the haunting and beautiful city of his vision still existed. Between 1997 and 1998, I made three trips to Paris and rephotographed five hundred of the outdoor scenes that Atget had photographed. "
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Essays by Clark Worswick and Alison Nordstrom give insight into Atget's life and situate Rauschenberg's work in the context of other rephotography projects. The book concludes with an epilogue by Rosamond Bernier as well as a portfolio of other images of contemporary Paris by Rauschenberg.
"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 C
"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.
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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.
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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.
“You were right to tell me that in life it is not the future which counts, but the past.”
Meet Guy Roland, an amnesiac detective. The story opens i
“You were right to tell me that in life it is not the future which counts, but the past.”
Meet Guy Roland, an amnesiac detective. The story opens in 1965, Roland's employer has decided to retire and close the detective agency where Guy has worked for the past eight years. Left with no vocation, our protagonist decides to start his own case: a search for his own past. We are jostled and pulled into several characters, who he somehow or other, presumes to be connected to his case. Going past dead ends, and false memories our man Roland, after interview upon interview, finally appears to have regained some of that lost memory.
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But to fill in the gaps in his mind, he needs to meet a certain Freddie. But where is Freddie? Is he still alive? Be prepared for that involves smugglers, swindlers and lost faces in the race of time.
As usual, Modiano makes memory his most vital weapon in writing, and the protagonist is left clutching at every straw to find some semblance to his identity. Keep reading to find a place lost back in time.
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