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The Red Notebook
Antoine Laurain
2015, 159 pages
Fiction
As this book opens, we see Laure Valadier being mugged. A few pages later, Laurent Latellier, owner of Le Cahier Rouge (The Red Notebook) bookstore, notices a handbag on top of a garbage bin. With the wallet and phone missing, Laurent can’t see who it belongs to. The local police are too busy to help. Still, he can’t bring himself to give up. So he goes through the contents, and he finds . . . a red notebook.
And much more, including a copy of Patrick Modiano‘s Accident Nocturne, signed, “For Laure, in memory of our meeting in the rain.” Laurent is stunned. “Modiano, the most elusive of French authors. Who hadn’t done any book signings for years . . .” He remembers that another bookseller has seen the Nobel laureate walking in Luxumbourg Garden, finds the great man walking one morning, and is rewarded with a description of the woman whose bag he found.
I won’t give away any more of Laurent’s search, but it’s not a straightforward matter of finding the purse’s owner and all living happily after. Laure has her own part to play, her own mystery to solve.
Reading this, I wanted to be in Paris, eating Laurent’s pot-au-feu, meeting the people in the gilding workshop where Laure works. Just reading about people gilding things for a living transported me. The Red Notebook is not a flimsy escapist read, though. It’s a thoughtful book. A gentle mystery that reflects on what is mysterious. A romantic story that examines what we reveal to others and what we keep hidden.
