Modiano writes with such a clear and distinct voice that it is impossible not to be drawn into the story of Jean Eyben, a man who is less a detective and perhaps more of a writer; one might say that Eyben's inclinations towards finding inspiration for his writing in his apprenticeship with Hutte Agency is an obvious hint towards his position as an unreliable narrator. The transitions between the moment of interest (the initial investigation) to Eyben's own personal curiosity years later are abrupt and rife with the empty spaces in which memory, fickle and capricious, often leaves us with gaps in time. Eyben feels as distant to the reader as the woman he searches for, but it is through his eyes and his own struggle of recollection that we find kinship to. Who can you trust, in the end, if you cannot trust yourself or the memory of who you once were?

Invisible Ink makes the reader feel the yawn of time, the lapse of memory, the question of a resolution. It is certainly a worthy, enrapturing read.

"There are blanks in this life, white spaces you can detect...a single sheet in a sky-blue folder that has faded with time...my only remnant of the Hutte Detective Agency...a 'case'...that hadn't yet been solved-a souvenir...slid into my briefcase after saying my goodbyes...".

Jean Eyben's first and only case as a young private investigator for the Hutte Agency was to look into the disappearance of Noelle LeFebvre. Noelle lived in the 15th arrondissement in Paris. Eyben was instructed to do the following: speak to the concierge at Noelle's apartment dwelling, use her ID to retrieve her mail at the General Delivery window at the post office, then wait and hope she would enter the cafe she was most likely to frequent. Eyben imagined "a silhouette of Noelle" taking the path from apartment...to post office...to cafe. He imagined a few people who might have seen her. "All I needed was a little patience and in that period of my life, I felt capable of waiting for hours in the sun and rain". Days passed and eventually Hutte was no longer interested in pursuing the cold case of Noelle LeFebvre. "From this point on, it concerned only me...[Hutte] was giving me free rein...that's what I thought at the time...but...he had perhaps guessed how deeply I was implicated in this 'case'...he'd given me a few clues. it was my job to follow up".

Three decades had now passed since Eyben worked at Hutte Detective Agency. The cold case was still ever present in his mind. Perhaps writing his ruminations would unlock clues he discovered in dribs and drabs over the years. A black cloth-covered notebook found in Noelle's dresser had sparse notations of places, appointments, monetary amounts and train arrivals. Some words looked almost translucent...like watermarks. Eyben remembered a man wearing a sheepskin jacket who asked why he was looking for Noelle.

"There are blanks in a life...And then one day, it comes back to you unbidden, when you're alone and there are no distractions". "...to set down...as precisely as possible ...many words have vanished...sometimes...the memory of a sentence returns from the past, but, you don't know who whispered it". If Eyben continues to question Noelle LeFebvre's disappearance, will he better understand himself?

"Invisible Ink : A Novel" by Nobel Laureate Patrick Modiano is about recollection. As time passes and we enter different stages of life, how much can memory be trusted? How will facts compare to a fiction created by misremembering? If video clips or complete journal entries from prior times are available, testimonials tend toward accuracy, but, the cold case our protagonist is obsessed with occurred three decades ago. Did Noelle LeFebvre truly exist? If so, what is her real story? A compelling, enigmatic read.

Thank you Yale University Press and Net Galley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Jean Eyben is asked to look into Noëlle Lefebvre’s disappearance. While he is shadowing her movements, he is looking for someone who can vouch for her existence. He is starting to feel like he knows her: the more you repeat something the more real it feels as if your lie isn't entirely false and your statement becomes a truth of your past. It is almost as if you can summon someone by talking about them. 

Invisible Ink is foremost about the traces a person leaves behind in the world and the impact their (non-)existence can have on someone else’s life. The narrative is not chronological; it reads like the musings of an aged chronicler looking back on his life. He is connecting loose threads in the hope to complete his memory of the past and thereby completing his life(‘s work), ultimately leading to a better understanding of himself.

He makes good use of passive knowledge, believing that there is a right time for remembering things. A thirst for knowledge will benefit you later in life, even when you learn something with no particular goal in mind at that time. The same goes when you blank out parts of the past that you would rather forget. "It comforted me to think that even if you sometimes have memory gaps, all the details of your life are written somewhere in invisible ink."

Our narrator, Jean Eyben, is confident and persistent. You get to know him, but you’ll never get close to him. He will forever be a distant acquaintance. Patrick Modiano’s writing style is pleasant and the story reads quickly. For those of you interested in Invisible Ink: keep in mind that this is a slow-moving story without any excitement or suspense. It is just Jean Eyben and you silently contemplating questions about existence, truth, and finding answers. Invisible Ink is not necessarily a book I would recommend, but it has some interesting sections that will make you think.

This is only the second of Patrick Modiano’s novels I’ve read (the first being In the Cafe of Lost Youth) and already I feel I can detect similarities in the sort of enigmatic, slightly shady characters he employs and the atmosphere of a Paris in the decades after WWII when it was still possible to obscure the past, reinvent oneself and disappear. There is a tense yet languid air to his writing that I find compulsive reading. I read this in one sitting and was entranced by Jean’s memory trail, uncovering events little by little to reach a perfect ending. Highly recommended.

With thanks to Yale University Press via NetGalley for the opportunity to read an ARC.

Literary and living, Patrick Modiano offers much in the written word. I recommend this book for those who are interested in the artistic writing of Nobel-prizing winner authors, and those who appreciate the beauty of the written word. An aesthetic experience.

I was attracted to Invisible Ink because author Patrick Modiano was the winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature, and because I hadn’t read him before. Now finished this fine novel, I see that other reviewers recognise various settings and characters in these pages; it would seem that Modiano has revisited the themes of memory and writing and missing persons across his oeuvre and his regular readers can see how Invisible Ink figures into that bigger picture. Alas, I would love to join their laudatory ranks and exclaim, “This is genius and essential!”, but that would be posturing on my part: This novel is fine — interesting and impeccably written (kudos to translator Mark Polizzotti as well) — but taken as its own discrete entity, I found it a short diversion and not much more. Even so: I am totally open to reading more Modiano and discovering how this relates to the whole.

'It comforted me to think that even if you sometimes have memory gaps. all the details of your life are written somewhere in invisible ink.'

This is archetypal Modiano as it contemplates the existentialism of memory and narrative through a surprisingly accessible story that purports to be the investigation of a woman who has gone missing in Paris. Whereas Modiano's 'Sleep of Memory' was structured around lines of lights that led from one point to another, flashing in and out of existence, this has an architecture of the eponymous invisible ink: traces that are unseen until they become seen through a catalyst that brings them to the surface.

Short but dense, this is haunting and really almost gripping!

*Many thanks to Patrick Modiano, Yale University Press and NetGalley for arc in exchange for my honest review.*
I wanted to like this novel more as it deals with memory and how we remember things, however, narration was rather confusing and eventually this book did not deliver as much as I had wished. Another problem was editing. A lot of words in my kindle version were 'shortened', and guessing the word was not easy and definitely stopped the flow of reading.

Always on alert when an author is touted as “Grand Winner of XYZ Prize”.
And, once again, a “meh” book. Too many (flat) characters, languid description of atmosphere, confusing timelines, wrapped in a thankfully short book.
Kindle file formatting problems ate into the pleasure of reading this book, too. For some reason “fi”, “ffi”, “fl” were missing from the text, but, strangely, not “fr”.
It’s not dicult to gure out the eect this has on reading.

Yale University Press, in collaboration with the Margellos World Republic of Letters, will be publishing Patrick Modiano’s latest work, Encre sympathique, in a lovely English translation by Mark Polizzotti. In this novella, the Nobel-Prizewinner explores the themes of identity, memory and the past. These are time-honoured subjects in literature, to which Modiano himself has repeatedly returned, turning them into a sort of leitmotif of his oeuvre.

The narrator of Invisible Ink, to give the novella its English title, is one Jean Eyben who, thirty years before he sets out to recount his story, worked for a stint with a detective agency in Paris. One of the cases in which he was then involved was the disappearance of a young woman, Noëlle Lefebvre. The facts which his boss, Hutte, provided him with were scant, and Eyben’s attempts at discovering the whereabouts of the elusive Noëlle soon drew a blank – so much so that he started to doubt whether the subject of his investigation did exist at all.

This notwithstanding, the case intrigued Eyben enough for him to take the file with him when he quit the job. Eyben has got on with his life, but every so often, he returns to the Lefebvre file and has a go at solving the mystery. With the passage of time, the days of his youth becoming increasingly distant, Eyben’s efforts to fill the blanks in the investigation lead him to question his own memories and impressions.

Indeed, there is much that is tentative in the narration – Eyben himself admits that his account does not follow any formal order. At one point he states that he must force himself to respect chronology as much as possible so as not to “get lost in those spaces where memory blurs into forgetting”. Soon after, however, he gives up – “it’s impossible to draw up that sort of calendar after such a long time… memories occur as the pen flies. You shouldn’t force them, but just write”. He then reveals that he has “never respected chronological order… Present and the past blend together in a kind of transparency, and every instant I lived in my youth appears to me in an eternal present, set apart from everything.”

The title of the novel (as well as certain plot elements such as the thin, uninformative file and the few vague entries in Nöelle’s day book) become a metaphor for memories which, besides often being few and incomplete, tend to disappear. Like invisible ink, they may return if given the right nudge.

Towards the end, the narrative shifts to the third person, and the setting moves from Paris to Rome. In this part of the book, Modiano shows that being a “literary author” (for want of a better description) need not be at the expense of good, old-fashioned storytelling. The ending – poetic and moving, almost bordering on the sentimental – provides a satisfying solution to the mystery at the heart of the novella. At the same time, aptly for a work on the transience of memory, Invisible Ink leaves us with plenty of loose ends – certainly enough to leave the narrative clouded in a metaphorical fog. The few certainties we acquire are hard-earned but thrilling, like a ray of light breaking through the haze among the mountains of Eyben’s youth.

Another beautiful novel from Patrick Modiano. Invisible Ink visits the subject of memory. How one memory can evolve and change over time, always intetesting.