This book is a great disappointment. Since Modiano has been chosen as the Nobel Price of Literature, I thought I should give one of his books a try. I picked that one at random, mostly because I liked the title.
The summary says that the narrator follows the mystery surrounding the suicide of a couple back in the 30's. But that's not the story at all. This is about how the narrator gets lost in his own memories. I don't even understand why the whole suicide thing is there. Obviously, there are some strong themes, like the second world war, and how it affected the narrator, but it's a really cold and uninteresting book. It's well-written, but I couldn't get into it. And the narrator creeped me out. I should have known there was something fishy about him because he's remembering a murder that happened a long time ago, but he's just obsessed. Obsessed with people. At some point in the book (minor spoiler), he meets a guy, so he looks for information about the guy behind his back, and then, around a cup of coffee, he goes like "hey, I heard you're lying about your identity and you've done some bad things during the war ??". I get it : the whole point of the book is to show that people are not what they seem to be, but the narrator is a creep nonetheless.
I was ready to read a lot of books by Modiano, but I think I'm going to stop there for now.