Honeymoon.

MODIANO, Patrick [Philip Roth].

$2,000.00

Item Number: 146091

Boston: Verba Mundi/ David A. Godine, 1995.

First American edition of this “haunting tale of quiet intensity” (Review of Contemporary Fiction). Octavo, original half cloth. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the half-title page, “For Philip, avec toute mon amitie Patrick Modiano.” Roth first gained attention with the 1959 collection Goodbye, Columbus, which won the  National Book Award for Fiction. Ten years later, he published the bestseller Portnoy’s Complaint. Nathan Zuckerman, Roth’s literary alter-ego, narrates several of his books. A fictionalized Philip Roth serves as narrator for some of his others, such as the alternate history The Plot Against America, Roth went on to be one of the most honored American writers of his generation. Roth received the National Book Critics Circle award for The Counterlife, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock, The Human Stain and Everyman, a second National Book Award for Sabbath’s Theater, and the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 2001, Roth received the inaugural Franz Kafka Prize. Fine in a fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Louise Fili. Translated by Barbara Wright. From the library of Philip Roth.

A winner of France's prestigious Prix Goncourt and the Nobel Prize, Modiano is the author of 17 novels as well as the screenplay for Louis Malle's noteworthy film, Lacombe Lucien. In this slight but probing novel, a middle-aged man decides to take a "honeymoon." Scheduled to fly to Brazil on a job, documentary filmmaker Jean B. instead slips away to Milan and then returns to a Parisian suburb. There he attempts to trace the life and death (by suicide) of a woman named Ingrid, whom he met while hitchhiking to Saint-Tropez. World War II is raging, and Ingrid, who is traveling with her husband, clearly has something to hide. Ingrid's mystery is not rewardingly played out, but Modiano is a wonderfully evocative writer--there's a nice touch of menace throughout, and the cool, collected writing feels like a salve.