Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

Patrick Modlano writes in a clear manner brings his characters alive draws me in.This is a haunting book about memory and the fading of it.A short book that kept me reading late into the night.#netgalley #yale upress

“Invisible Ink: A Novel” is my introduction to Patrick Modiano, a French author who won the Nobel Prize back in 2014. With such a heavy backdrop, I was afraid that this book might be one of those works that were very important but not at all enjoyable. I was wrong.

This is a story about memory, about the wispy connections that we make throughout our lives to people, places, and times. As we move on with our lives, sometimes those threads come back and catch our attention, make us wonder, send us down a different path. It is a story about gaps, the missing, the things written in invisible ink on the pages of our history.

Our narrator was briefly a private detective thirty-some years ago. One of his cases involved the search for a missing woman, Noëlle Lefebvre. Although there wasn’t much to go on and it was a brief assignment, this case continues to haunt him. The bits and pieces that he picked up and never could track down continue to cross his path from time to time across the years: an out-of-work actor who was also looking for her, her notebook/journal that he stole from her apartment, a co-worker who was left behind, a husband(?) who has moved on with life, a link to his childhood and memories of an American car, a trip to Rome for the final conclusion, but not necessarily a resolution.

I enjoyed everything about this book – the language (wonderful translation), the atmosphere, the location, the flitting across timelines. A quick read that will stay with you long after the last page.

I requested and received a free advanced electronic copy from Yale University Press via NetGalley. Thank you!

This novel is about remembering the forgotten past through a thick veil. It starts with an investigation about a missing person, but the case goes cold very quickly when there is no trail to follow.
Throughout the following years, the narrator remembers this missing person case from time to time, for short periods, as some leads keep coming on his way and his interest is triggered again and again.
Years go by before bits and pieces start to come together. He remembers his own childhood, meets some old friends, searches through his own past, trying to find another lead.
Over the years, his mind gets foggy, yet he keeps remembering things, jumping back and forth in time following a piece of memory in his mind.
There is nothing linear or consequential in this novel: timeline of the narrative changes constantly, characters seem to change their names, what they do and where they live. Stories of each character are intermingled; the links among them fade and reappear as the narrator follows the breadcrumbs to the final destination.
I recommend this novel to readers who like to get lost in someone else’s mind and enjoy a mixture of non-linear narrative and mystery.
Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for this ARC copy.

As usual, memory and the impossibility of forgetting are Modiano’s themes here, and the novel explores one man’s obsession with the mysterious Noelle Lefebvre, a woman he was once employed to trace during his short stint as a private detective. He fails to find her at that time but she continues to haunt him and thirty years later he sets out on another quest to find her. I was left as puzzled as Jean Eyben was all the way through. The story seems to be without a point – unless the pointlessness of memory is actually the point. The narrative really doesn't go anywhere. It doesn’t go anywhere in a particularly atmospheric and lyrical way – but it still doesn’t go anywhere, and I found the style typically and annoyingly vague and dreamy. I keep trying with Modiano but essentially I just don’t “get” him. Not for me, this one.

The Mysteries and Melodies of Memory in “Invisible Ink.”


When the great Patrick Modiano says he is writing a detective story, rest assured it won’t be a Sherlock-esque exhibition of armchair deductions or Poirot-like psychoanalysis of a criminal. Most likely, there won’t even be a crime.

Jean Eyben, the narrator of Modiano’s Invisible Ink, is barely a detective. He really only spent a few months working for the Hutte Detective Agency. His first case was the disappearance of a certain Noëlle Lefebre, whom no one in Paris seems to know anything about. The few leads he follows don’t immediately bear fruit and he never solves the case. On his last day at the agency, he sneakily takes the notes he had on Noëlle with him as a souvenir.

Thirty years later, Jean hasn’t forgotten about Noëlle. Every couple of years or so, something he sees in the streets of Paris or a chance encounter with an old friend takes him back to his notes on Noëlle. He continues chasing doggedly, one sketchy witness to another. The witnesses reveal a muddled web of people Noëlle is supposed to have known, but they don’t know enough to piece together her identity. It is a mystery to Jean why this case has an inexplicable pull on him and he is forced to search the crevasses of his own memory for answers.

Like his detective, Modiano is obsessed with memory and forgetting. He has written more than a dozen books on this topic. Some say Modiano writes the same book over and over and in fact, he admits it himself. The general premise goes like this: a woman is missing and a man has to go searching for her. The search raises even more questions and he rummages into his recollections, unaware of the tricks his head is playing on him. These crazed searches often happen in Paris, the city Modiano’s loves writing about. By the end of Invisible Ink, the 15th arrondissement, the Rue de la Convention, and the Lancel storefront at Place l’Opera could very well leave a permanent etch on a reader’s mind.

Modiano’s stories almost exclusively unfold in France, especially Paris. It is perhaps one of the reasons he isn’t widely read in America. When Modiano won the Nobel Prize in 2014, only a few books by him had been translated to English. His first three books, now grouped as The Occupation Trilogy, were provocative takes on the German occupation of France and immediately launched him into literary stardom. More recently, he has been writing about memories and illusions—the mysteries of the mind. It is hard to resist comparing Modiano to Marcel Proust. It is even harder when his first novel’s protagonist is so obsessed with becoming like Proust.

Invisible Ink is an exposition on how memories evolve with time. There is the process of forgetting by which time makes things cloudier and scattered. This is very natural. We all forget things. Modiano is more interested in the opposite process by which forgotten memories suddenly resurface or become clearer—much like how sand dunes in a desert erode to expose buried tombs. Jean Eyben discovers how certain details about Noëlle’s case suddenly emerge in his mind. He uncovers connections between Noëlle and his own life. Perhaps that explains the pull her case has on him. Had he ever met Noëlle himself? Also, had her name always been Noëlle?

The details he salvages, however, aren’t enough to solve his original puzzle. Eyben’s narrative abruptly terminates near the end, and we are transported to Noëlle’s world. We learn that she has been running away and has found a blissful escape in Rome, the city where one learns to forget oneself. A prodding visitor to her shop forces her to revisit her own past. Images of her life before Rome slowly come back to her like old pictures being dusted. The end of the novel, she is scared of forgetting and being forgotten and she vows to tell this new friend everything.

Invisible Ink is one of those books you must read twice:the first time to hear about Jean Eyben’s search for Noëlle and the second time to see how Modiano plays with Eyben’s memory—how he leaves breadcrumbs that lead Eyben to epiphanies. There is also a beautiful refrain that connects Noëlle’s life in Paris with her new life in Rome—but instead of Proust’s Vinteuil Sonata, this time, it is a verse by Paul Verlaine.

Modiano’s novellas tend to have an orchestral vibe when read together. This translation of Invisible Ink could be a perfect opportunity to follow, albeit in reverse, a brilliant odyssey in the mysteries of memory.

What a privilege to read an accomplished French author in English. Thanks, must go to the publishers and the fine translation.
On the face of it, this is the story of a young man’s fleeting experience working for a detective agency. His half-hearted attempt to trace a missing woman and the fact her case has beguiled him, ever since, for the rest of his life.
Pocketing her case file when he left this employment. This is the story of his part-time obsession, a personal account of his ongoing dipping into this missing woman’s story and last known details. Sometimes without intent, but from chance events where circumstances brought her name up in conversation or where he could re-interview a witness who knew her during her time in Paris.
The writing flows, as the book is the reported notes of this young man explaining his life-long fixation with this woman who vanished from Paris.
Interestingly it explores the role of memory. How things are recalled; that sometimes over stressing can bring confusion, while chance or circumstance can bring clarity. Like an old-fashioned photo developing and coming into focus. Perhaps signs or spaces revealing something previously unseen, hidden or concealed. Like a page of invisible writing being revealed over time where the day before was just a blank page.
The way the narrative progresses is also cleverly conceived. As a young man and as he ages there is no real structure to his memories or a revised timeline to write up a chronological report of his investigations.
These thoughts are haphazard, jumbled, almost as he remembers them. He sees the writing process as needing pen on page, like a skier zig zagging down the mountain side. Backwards and forwards, slaloming down rather than a straight decent.
A very interesting novel about the act and art of remembering and how we can learn to forget. Cleverly constructed with a twist and a sense of mystery.
Fun to read, plenty of issues raised, but mostly as points come up, like indirect markers and asides. An entertainment, not an essay on the mind, but a revelation all the same.
Here’s the main point. It will beckon to be reread and will enlighten and please on each fresh reading where perhaps new type will surface from the page.

This is a beautiful, elegantly written story.
Jean, the narrator tells the story almost as a monologue looking back over many years in his search for Noelle Lefebvre who went missing in Paris in the 1960s. His memories have been dulled by the passage of time.
As I read the novel I was reminded of some of the finer novels of George's Simenon: short, intriguing and masterfully crafted.

This is the first Patrick Modiano book I have read so I wasn't sure what to expect. It's a short read, with the storyline of a detective going back to an old mystery that he never solved the disappearance of a woman.

It's well written, and I was eager to read it in one go - I read it in two sittings, but it's a compelling read and I could easily have read it one sitting, given the time.

It's elegantly written and interesting, but doesn't really go anywhere. That didn't diminish the story while I was reading it, but it left me slightly unsatisfied at the abrupt end, which didn't reach a satisfying conclusion. I admit that I do like a proper end to my stories!

The book is aptly titled Invisible Ink, and it seemed to me that there were invisible things happening in the story that were just out of my reach as I pieced together the story as it developed - much like there was for the detective. So in a way, as the detective was working his way through the mystery of the disappearance, we too worked our way through the story of the detective, both of us being hampered by layers of invisibiity, if they were there at all.

An interesting, if short, read.

Review of Invisible Ink: Patrick Modiano’s quiet literary novel, Invisible Ink, is a detective story that spans 30 years and multiple cities. It has all of the ingredients of a good story: a woman who disappeared into thin air; the people who knew her a version of her; and the main character who is quietly obsessed with the case.

The main character is working for the Hutte Detective Agency and he’s given the case of tracking down Noelle Lefebvre. His boss, owner of the agency, gives him instructions to pick up her mail, stake out a cafe, and ask if anyone had seen her. And almost from the beginning, the main character drums into our head that he’s a poor detective.

He’s not super chatty or outgoing, which could be a recipe for a cool story about a bumbling detective who somehow manages to find the vanished lady. But it never quite comes together that way. Sure this starts off as a job for him but he’s suddenly recounting things after 30 years and there’s no good reason that he would have become obsessed with a woman who’d vanished that long ago, especially with so little to go on.

He follows the clues along, finding out her apartment (where he steals her day planner, which cheered me up since it felt detective-y) and where she worked where her co-worker speculates if she’s dead.

Invisible Ink didn’t grab me. If you can tell by my review, I’m lukewarm about it. It’s more of a short literary novel with a sprinkling of detective story in it. And even though the main character devotes different moments in his life to finding Noelle, she never was fully realized as a character. She was someone to chase, but no reason why. There’s a tenuous connection to them maybe knowing each other from the same village but the main character never connects that.

Invisible Ink is a short book, meaning you’re going to finish it within a few days. But if it’s really a mystery you’re looking for, you may want to grab one of Cara Black’s Aimee Leduc mysteries instead.

I came to this novel with all the weight of expectation you would imagine from a Nobel prize winner. It is very intelligent and literary and sometimes feel disconnected from life as a result. But, if you're willing to rise to it, the rewards are significant.

I always feel like I am missing something with Patrick Modiano's books. It's not that they aren't amazing. I just end up feel like I'm not quite smart enough to get everything that he is writing about. The story line are always complex but laid out beautifully. I feel like I always have to take my time reading his books so that I don't miss anything, which is both good and bad.

Recollection Versus Memory; Let the Game Begin

If in a cavalier mood one might be tempted to describe this book as the most elegant, languid, and atmospheric detective procedural ever written. Of course it isn't really a detective novel; that's just the frame the author uses to set up his tale. But it achieves its purpose - the slow accretion of facts and details, a certain amount of legwork and observation, subtle interrogation, the forging and finding of links, the sudden appearance of insights and hidden connection - this is the method of the detective and of this book.

Our unreliable detective hero is haunted, mocked, and frustrated by his task, and by the vicissitudes of memory itself, and we are drawn along with him. Sometimes we are a bit ahead of him, and sometimes a bit behind, but we share the same fragmented, incomplete, and sometimes invisible world of recollection and experience. Modiano toys with us, even as he deals with a fair deck, (possibly marked, though, with invisible ink?), and plays with his cards face up.

This is grand, elegant, and satisfying in the best possible way. It's Modiano, so you can either rhapsodize about him or just offer a Gallic shrug. Either reaction is fine.

(Please note that I received a free ecopy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)

This was not for me. Short with abrupt ending and strange story. I do appreciate the opportunity to read this book in galley form, though. I'm sure other people will find it more to their taste.

Evocative short novel about the fading of memory and questioning of the effects on one's life. The protagonist obsession in finding the truth is so well written that the reader is obsessed with discovering the same.

Patrick Modiano has said he keeps writing the same book over and over, but that doesn't mean that if you've read one, you've read them all. Threads and atmospheric descriptions are echoed, but I still love getting caught up in his narrator's obsessions with a haunting past, and following the trail as it weaves and characters are introduced. Also, the weather is a big part of the scene in Modiano's work -- it's either raining or swelteringly hot. I'll keep on reading him as long as the books keep getting translated.

A short mystery that had pockets of beautiful sentences, but I found the plot - of what there was - hard to follow. There wasn't much of a conclusion.

This book was interesting enough. Had I read it in French, I probably would have enjoyed it more. However, the editing of the translation was super rough. It seemed that whenever the translator didn't know the full word in English, they just wrote two of the letters. For example, they used "nd" when I assume they wanted the word "find".

I recently adopted a rescue dog. When taken to my vet, she said it probably was a combination of Rottweiler and Dachshund- a big dog trapped in a small dog’s body. This struck me as a fitting metaphor for Patrick Modiano’s new novel #InvisibleInk - a long book written in barely 100 pages. In fact the structuring is so economical I read it three times so I would hopefully grasp what Modiano intended. As it’s title suggests, the story is before your eyes, but it takes a while for it to come into view. The plot is simple enough; a novice private investigator is given the assignment by his boss to discover the whereabouts of a missing woman. With almost nothing to go on he sets out on his task, to no avail. Shortly thereafter he changes occupations, case unsolved. Over the next 30 years, through random happenstances, the case comes back to mind and he begins to reinvestigate. It is then that the invisible ink begins coming into view and becomes an hypnotic meditation on time and memory and how those factors are the core of the stories that become our lives, and when those stories become a large portrait instead of just a small snapshot.

I was really looking forward to reading this book given the pedigree of the author. Invisible Ink by Patrick Modiano is apparently one of France's most eminent authors and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Sadly however great an author Modiano is this didn't do much for me,not least as just as I thought the book had reached the part when all would be revealed....it ended.

The story,such as it is,tells of a young Private Detective,Jean Eyben, trying to trace the whereabouts of a missing woman. He fails and on leaving that job he helps himself to the case file and over the course of the next few decades ...yes ,decades, he occasionally dips into the case again while telling the reader it's not really a big deal to him.

This is barely a story at all,more musings on memory and the passing of time,some of it is striking,more often it's just ponderous and seems pointless as there are suggestions of a fascinating plot that is never revealed. It seems this is very much Modiano's style as part of the Wikipedia entry for one of his earlier books says, "the reader is left with a sense of vagueness as to what happened and when",which very much sums up this book as well.

Maybe I'm a Philistine , maybe I just didn't get it but to me this was half a story that plodded along then stopped abruptly with revelation but no resolution..

Thanks to Patrick Modiano, Yale University Press and Netgalley for the ARC in return for an honest review.