Jean Eyben is asked to look into Noëlle Lefebvre’s disappearance. While he is shadowing her movements, he is looking for someone who can vouch for her existence. He is starting to feel like he knows her: the more you repeat something the more real it feels as if your lie isn't entirely false and your statement becomes a truth of your past. It is almost as if you can summon someone by talking about them. 

Invisible Ink is foremost about the traces a person leaves behind in the world and the impact their (non-)existence can have on someone else’s life. The narrative is not chronological; it reads like the musings of an aged chronicler looking back on his life. He is connecting loose threads in the hope to complete his memory of the past and thereby completing his life(‘s work), ultimately leading to a better understanding of himself.

He makes good use of passive knowledge, believing that there is a right time for remembering things. A thirst for knowledge will benefit you later in life, even when you learn something with no particular goal in mind at that time. The same goes when you blank out parts of the past that you would rather forget. "It comforted me to think that even if you sometimes have memory gaps, all the details of your life are written somewhere in invisible ink."

Our narrator, Jean Eyben, is confident and persistent. You get to know him, but you’ll never get close to him. He will forever be a distant acquaintance. Patrick Modiano’s writing style is pleasant and the story reads quickly. For those of you interested in Invisible Ink: keep in mind that this is a slow-moving story without any excitement or suspense. It is just Jean Eyben and you silently contemplating questions about existence, truth, and finding answers. Invisible Ink is not necessarily a book I would recommend, but it has some interesting sections that will make you think.

This is only the second of Patrick Modiano’s novels I’ve read (the first being In the Cafe of Lost Youth) and already I feel I can detect similarities in the sort of enigmatic, slightly shady characters he employs and the atmosphere of a Paris in the decades after WWII when it was still possible to obscure the past, reinvent oneself and disappear. There is a tense yet languid air to his writing that I find compulsive reading. I read this in one sitting and was entranced by Jean’s memory trail, uncovering events little by little to reach a perfect ending. Highly recommended.

With thanks to Yale University Press via NetGalley for the opportunity to read an ARC.

Literary and living, Patrick Modiano offers much in the written word. I recommend this book for those who are interested in the artistic writing of Nobel-prizing winner authors, and those who appreciate the beauty of the written word. An aesthetic experience.

I was attracted to Invisible Ink because author Patrick Modiano was the winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature, and because I hadn’t read him before. Now finished this fine novel, I see that other reviewers recognise various settings and characters in these pages; it would seem that Modiano has revisited the themes of memory and writing and missing persons across his oeuvre and his regular readers can see how Invisible Ink figures into that bigger picture. Alas, I would love to join their laudatory ranks and exclaim, “This is genius and essential!”, but that would be posturing on my part: This novel is fine — interesting and impeccably written (kudos to translator Mark Polizzotti as well) — but taken as its own discrete entity, I found it a short diversion and not much more. Even so: I am totally open to reading more Modiano and discovering how this relates to the whole.

'It comforted me to think that even if you sometimes have memory gaps. all the details of your life are written somewhere in invisible ink.'

This is archetypal Modiano as it contemplates the existentialism of memory and narrative through a surprisingly accessible story that purports to be the investigation of a woman who has gone missing in Paris. Whereas Modiano's 'Sleep of Memory' was structured around lines of lights that led from one point to another, flashing in and out of existence, this has an architecture of the eponymous invisible ink: traces that are unseen until they become seen through a catalyst that brings them to the surface.

Short but dense, this is haunting and really almost gripping!

*Many thanks to Patrick Modiano, Yale University Press and NetGalley for arc in exchange for my honest review.*
I wanted to like this novel more as it deals with memory and how we remember things, however, narration was rather confusing and eventually this book did not deliver as much as I had wished. Another problem was editing. A lot of words in my kindle version were 'shortened', and guessing the word was not easy and definitely stopped the flow of reading.

Always on alert when an author is touted as “Grand Winner of XYZ Prize”.
And, once again, a “meh” book. Too many (flat) characters, languid description of atmosphere, confusing timelines, wrapped in a thankfully short book.
Kindle file formatting problems ate into the pleasure of reading this book, too. For some reason “fi”, “ffi”, “fl” were missing from the text, but, strangely, not “fr”.
It’s not dicult to gure out the eect this has on reading.

Yale University Press, in collaboration with the Margellos World Republic of Letters, will be publishing Patrick Modiano’s latest work, Encre sympathique, in a lovely English translation by Mark Polizzotti. In this novella, the Nobel-Prizewinner explores the themes of identity, memory and the past. These are time-honoured subjects in literature, to which Modiano himself has repeatedly returned, turning them into a sort of leitmotif of his oeuvre.

The narrator of Invisible Ink, to give the novella its English title, is one Jean Eyben who, thirty years before he sets out to recount his story, worked for a stint with a detective agency in Paris. One of the cases in which he was then involved was the disappearance of a young woman, Noëlle Lefebvre. The facts which his boss, Hutte, provided him with were scant, and Eyben’s attempts at discovering the whereabouts of the elusive Noëlle soon drew a blank – so much so that he started to doubt whether the subject of his investigation did exist at all.

This notwithstanding, the case intrigued Eyben enough for him to take the file with him when he quit the job. Eyben has got on with his life, but every so often, he returns to the Lefebvre file and has a go at solving the mystery. With the passage of time, the days of his youth becoming increasingly distant, Eyben’s efforts to fill the blanks in the investigation lead him to question his own memories and impressions.

Indeed, there is much that is tentative in the narration – Eyben himself admits that his account does not follow any formal order. At one point he states that he must force himself to respect chronology as much as possible so as not to “get lost in those spaces where memory blurs into forgetting”. Soon after, however, he gives up – “it’s impossible to draw up that sort of calendar after such a long time… memories occur as the pen flies. You shouldn’t force them, but just write”. He then reveals that he has “never respected chronological order… Present and the past blend together in a kind of transparency, and every instant I lived in my youth appears to me in an eternal present, set apart from everything.”

The title of the novel (as well as certain plot elements such as the thin, uninformative file and the few vague entries in Nöelle’s day book) become a metaphor for memories which, besides often being few and incomplete, tend to disappear. Like invisible ink, they may return if given the right nudge.

Towards the end, the narrative shifts to the third person, and the setting moves from Paris to Rome. In this part of the book, Modiano shows that being a “literary author” (for want of a better description) need not be at the expense of good, old-fashioned storytelling. The ending – poetic and moving, almost bordering on the sentimental – provides a satisfying solution to the mystery at the heart of the novella. At the same time, aptly for a work on the transience of memory, Invisible Ink leaves us with plenty of loose ends – certainly enough to leave the narrative clouded in a metaphorical fog. The few certainties we acquire are hard-earned but thrilling, like a ray of light breaking through the haze among the mountains of Eyben’s youth.

Another beautiful novel from Patrick Modiano. Invisible Ink visits the subject of memory. How one memory can evolve and change over time, always intetesting.