In the Cafe of Lost Youth

Four narrators, a student from a caf , a private detective hired by an aggrieved husband, the heroine herself and one of her lovers, construct a portrait of Jacqueline Delanque, otherwise known as Louki. The daughter of a single mother who works in the Moulin Rouge, Louki grows up in poverty in Montmartre. Her one attempt to escape her background fails when she is rejected from the Lyc e Jules-Ferry. She meanders on through life, into a cocaine habit, and begins frequenting the Caf Cond , whose regulars call her "Louki". She drifts into marriage with a real estate agency director, but finds no satisfaction with him or his friends and so makes the simple decision not to return to him one evening. She turns instead to a young man almost as aimless and adrift as she, but who perhaps loves her all the same. Ever-present through this story is the city of Paris, almost another character in her own right. This is the Paris of 'no-man's-lands', of lonely journeys on the last metro, or nocturnal walks along empty boulevards; of caf s where the lost youth wander in, searching for meaning, and the older generation sift through their memories of their own long-gone adolescence.
Translated from the French by Euan Cameron