This month I have been reading Patrick Mondiano's books, so far I have read two and about to finish the third. They are really entretaining and quite easy to read, apart from the huge list of names that appear in such a short amount of time, since this books are around 150-200 pages long. He reminds me of Borges in the fact that you can clearly see in what ideas he is interested in because they are repeated across different books constantly. And while Borges is interested in destiny, labyrinths and dreams, Mondiano seems to be with the concept of identity, memory and routine. This three books, Paris Nocturne, In the Café of Lost Youth and Missing Person revolve around the reconstruction of someone's life through testimonies, leftover documents and paperworks, which seems to be the only traces that most people left behind once they die. All of them are structured in Paris, around the early XX century and the characters across the novels are more or less the same, the lowlifes of the city. Out of the three books, In the Café of Lost Youth is my favourite and the one I would recommend the most because it use the same technique as Pedro Paramo, in which the main story progress through the testimonies of different people, each of them having a different reason to be thinking or talking about the person the story revolves around to.
