"Modiano is a pure original. He has transformed the novel into a laboratory for producing atmospheres, not situations–where everything must be inferred and nothing can be proved. . . . You don't read Modiano for answers. You read each Modiano novel for its place in a giant sequence: a new restatement of a single unsolvable crime."
–Adam Thirlwell,
The Guardian "[An] edge of mystery, of indirection, motivates [Modiano's work] like an animating force. . . . For Modiano, memory, experience are fluid, fleeting, and even the stories we tell ourselves are subject to change. Our lives flicker past us like the afterimage of a photo; eventually, our attempts at constancy must fall away."
–David Ulin, Los Angeles Times "Like W.G. Sebald, another European writer haunted by memory and by the history that took place just before he was born, Modiano combines a detective's curiosity with an elegist's melancholy." –Adam Kirsch,
The New Republic