Villa Triste : A Novel (Paperback)

from Hagelstein

A young man known as Victor Chmara ("the name I used on the registration form") flees Paris to a lake town in France, close to Switzerland. It's hard to tell what he fears, but wants to be able to escape to the traditionally neutral country if necessary. "I didn't know yet that Switzerland doesn'...

from bowedbookshelf

odiano has a melancholic bent whose sentences vibrate ("like a spider's web") with a kind of menace. We are never really sure who deserves the most scrutiny amongst his characters, but everyone in this novel seems to be hiding some dark past or grim present. Even the dog, a Great Dane, was "conge...

from seeword

Unlike much of Modiano's works, this is not set in Paris. It's set in 1960 at an unnamed French lakeside resort near the Swiss border (Lac d'Annecy, perhaps). The protagonist, Victor, is a stateless young man (Russian?) who meets up with a mysterious woman and her even more mysterious friend. Eve...

from Hagelstein

A young man known as Victor Chmara ("the name I used on the registration form") flees Paris to a lake town in France, close to Switzerland. It's hard to tell what he fears, but wants to be able to escape to the traditionally neutral country if necessary. "I didn't know yet that Switzerland doesn'...

from bowedbookshelf

odiano has a melancholic bent whose sentences vibrate ("like a spider's web") with a kind of menace. We are never really sure who deserves the most scrutiny amongst his characters, but everyone in this novel seems to be hiding some dark past or grim present. Even the dog, a Great Dane, was "conge...