THE BLACK NOTEBOOK

Bronson Pinchot elegantly narrates this mysterious novella. His fine French accent gives this brooding backward-glancing story by Nobel Prize winner Modiano a fine sense of time and place. Set in contemporary Paris, the story recounts the haunting experience of Jean, once a struggling writer, who now uses his notebook as a map to return to his long-ago dangerous liaison with Dannie. His Moroccan paramour, an expat in Paris, was mixed up with an unsavory group and may have been involved in a politically charged murder. Pinchot's nuanced narration of this brief work brings the listener into the complex past via Jean's black notebook, which links him with Dannie and her comrades. The energized Parisian street life of the 1960s is almost a character itself. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine [Published: JANUARY 2017]