In France, almost as much as abroad, Patrick Modiano seemed a man of mystery when, last year, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Through his 30-odd concise and elliptical novels, the shadows of wartime and post-war survival and subterfuge still clung to him. As the mysterious Annie Astrand says with a shiver when she meets the narrator of So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighbourhood in a chilly, deserted mansion by the Bois de Boulogne, "It's full of ghosts here." Unquiet and persistent, they throng Modiano's work.
