num_pages: 153
description: The elegant haunting story of the forgotten people and places of Paris from the reigning Nobel Laureate.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 Lyce 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 cafs where the lost youth wander in searching for meaning and the older generation sift through their memories of their own long-gone adolescence.
language: English
title: In the Café of Lost Youth
publisher: Quercus