Missing Persons (1978) by Patrick Modiano

Book Review

Missing Persons (1978) 

by Patrick Modiano

  Originally published in 1978, Missing Persons won the Prix Goncourt(the French Pulitzer) and established himself as a major literary talent inside France (he was five novels in to his career).  It is also- surprise surprise- the most accessible of the four books of his I've read.   Missing Persons actually takes the detective story by way of European existentialist format common to all of Modiano's novels and takes it somewhere- giving the reader a narrator who is investigating his own identity- having been found without memory as a young man in the aftermath of World War II.  Missing Persons is the Modiano to read first!

Inverted World (1974) by Christopher Priest

Cover of the 2008 reprint of Inverted World by Christopher Priest

Book Review

Inverted World (1974) 

by Christopher Priest

     A city called Earth on tracks is pulled ever north, pursuing a never obtainable "optimum" for reasons opaque to Howard Mann, an apprentice in the city's medieval-like guild system.  Is this an alien world? Who built the city?  It's all very unclear.  The afterward by John Clute argues that Inverted World is the first English example of the subgenre of "Hard Sci Fi" featuring mostly masculine heroes seeking the answers to complicated questions involving future science, interstellar travel, looming disaster, etc.   Like many examples of excellent genre fiction, the pleasure of the book is bound up in the ending, and any discussion of the narrative structure or the plot risks that payoff.