Author Patrick Modiano takes us back to wartime France under Nazi occupation and the Vichy regime. His memoir is triggered by seeing in 1988 an ad that had been placed in the “personals” column of the New Year’s Eve 1941 editon of Paris Soir: “Missing, a young girl, Dora Bruder, age 15, height 1 m 55, oval-shaped face, gray-brown eyes, gray sports jacket, maroon pullover, navy blue skirt and hat, brown gym shoes.”

Modiano finds little about the missing girl, but the search leads him to a meditation on the losses of the period—lost people, lost stories, and lost history.

From Kirkus Reviews:

A hauntingly fetching book, centered on one teenage girl’s avoidable death. Modiano’s novel Out of the Dark (1998) is also a short, nostalgic work fixated on a woman. This work is even darker, in that it weaves research, logical speculation, and emotive imagination around a Jewish girl who runs away from the convent school that is hiding her and soon disappears in Auschwitz via Drancy. Modiano’s obsessive search began about ten years ago when he saw an old 1941 newspaper notice about a missing 15-year-old girl named Dora Bruder. Using the powerful description that makes him a noted novelist in his native France (“the black interminable wall, the penumbra beneath the metro arches”), Modiano goes to the listed address and to many uncooperative offices to follow the paper trail, the bureaucratic banality of evil, that leads to Bruder’s bolting from her tedious but safe hiding place during the Nazi occupation. The tragedy took place in parts of Paris familiar to the author, though much has changed in 50 years, “and it takes time for what has been erased to resurface. What resurfaces through months of patient investigation are details about Dora’s parents and his own Jewish father, who abandoned the family, with speculation placing Dora and his father in the same predicament. Beyond the guesswork, like describing Mr. Bruder’s likely battles during five years with the French Foreign Legion, Modiano comes up with a few photos of Dora and her family and interviews a few survivors that knew the family. The author combines empathy and facts to see the suicidal ecstasy of Dora running away and hiding out on the wintry Parisian streets until her documented arrest and transport to oblivion. Not a Holocaust memoir or historical fiction but a skillful reconstruction of a life that strides the two genres. (3 b&w photos, 2 maps) — Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Jane (our expert) offers this link to Patrick Modiano’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech.