Young Once (1981, this version 2016) is set in the countryside in eastern
France in 1980 and Paris in 1964.
It is 22 June 1964, the day before Odile Memling’s 35th birthday, and the
last day of the kid’s camp business she owns near the Swiss alps with her
husband. Her husband, Louis, will be 35 in July. They have operated the business for 13 years,
and have two children. But it’s time to close the business and embark on
something new. They may turn their chalet into a restaurant and tea house.
Viterdo, Martine and their three children, from Paris, are with the
Memlings to celebrate Odile’s birthday. So too is Allard, the elderly local
sports store owner.
As one period in the life of Louis and Odile ends, they both turn their
thoughts to Paris in December 1964 when they were nineteen – young once. Louis
was ending his two-year military service and thinking of starting a business,
and Odile was an aspiring singer. Both young, and contemplating their future.
Broke, but adventurous, they were both looking for a new start in their
careers and their lives. In Paris they found each other. They made plans for a
future together. Their youth in the seedy environment of Paris was fleeting –
for them it was a brief seven months – at least that is the way they remembered
it. Memories are so fleeting. But from that time forward, their youth was gone
as they worked hard to establish the children’s camp in the mountains.
Modiano won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2014. Young Once, written in
French, was his breakthrough novel. Memories, nostalgia, youth, and feeling
that 35 is ‘old’ are themes that run through this brief, but thoughtful novel.
But these memories of Odile and Louis are not told from their perspective – in
the first person – for they are told in the third person. It is what it is –
not individual lives, but co-dependent, connected lives that travel the one
path to the Swiss alps, never to see Paris again, where they were young once.
MARTINA NICOLLS is an international
aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of
Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet
(2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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