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Absolutely Modiano's best work
You can read this small book (140 pages) in a couple of hours, and you can summarize the content in a few sentences. But I've learned to be cautious with Modiano. His seemingly simple stories, written in a very smooth style, hide a great complexity and the intensity of the stories can be quite heavy.

In this book for instance there's the story of Dora Bruder, a jewish girl of 15, living in the Paris of 1941, during the occupation by the nazis. She's revolting against her too docile parents, but nevertheless gets caught up in the machinery of the holocaust and taken to Auschwitz. Modiano brings her story in bits and pieces, very carefully naming names and places (in Paris, of course) to make it more realistic. And with great emphasis he focusses on the detestable role of the French collaborators in the hunt on jews. He also describes the forlorn and ambiguous feelings of the jews (and some non-jews) that had to endure this terror (really heartbreaking is the letter of a man in a camp, waiting to be put on a convoy).

The second layer is that of the author himself (I suspect Modiano is autobiographical on this): we see how he becomes obsessed by the newspaper article of 1941 in which the parents of Dora seek help to find their runaway daughter. Frequently he links the events in Dora's life with his own: the neighbourhoods they both lived in, the rebellious phase they went through, the confrontation with the police, the problematic relation with their parents, and so on. He uses every element to get to know more about this Dora.

That's where we find the third layer: the desperate attempt of the author to reconstruct a life that has passed, gone up in smoke (in this case literally); or better: it's not only an attempt to reconstruct, but more to grasp it, or to lay hold of it. Modiano obsessively wants to know what went through Dora's mind, how she experienced the events she had to undergo. And he's quite inventive in this process: he not only looks for witnesses or archival documents, he also makes use of "historical imagination", walking in the footsteps of Dora, literally through the same streets and neighbourhoods and imagining what she saw and felt.

But, with Modiano, we have to conclude that ultimately, this is not possible; it is an illusion to really "grasp" or "get hold of". I've noticed this fundamental pessimism in Modiano before; according to him it is one of the key elements in the human condition; you can not really grasp the past, you can not really grasp others and you even cannot really grasp your own existence.

Personally, I don't share this pessimism. His scepticism is justified, but I have the impression Modiano just expects too much, his desire to grasp is too absolute and in that sense parching. Because, when you look at this book: what he achieves through the novel 'Dora Bruder' is quite something, it is if he has brought her back to life and that is magnificent. Did he bring her back totally, as she really was? Honestly, I don't think that is ultimately relevant. This is a great novel and the highlight of Modiano's oeuvre!