Im Café der verlorenen Jugend

Even as a young girl, Louki was always running away from her mother's apartment, an usherette at the Moulin Rouge. She never saw the father. She left her husband, a wealthy real estate agent, a year after they were married. She runs in an esoteric circle, snorts a little "snow" with a friend every now and then and finally falls in love with the budding writer Roland. Together they roam the big city for days. Louki thinks she has found refuge in Café Le Condé, the "Café of lost youth" in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, while her husband's detective has already picked up her trail: with wonderful ease, Patrick Modiano, the great contemporary French writer, creates an incomparable atmosphere in which the Paris of the early sixties is revived.