Travel Writers Online

on  the rue Picpus in Paris.  Glance at the front cover of the US edition of Modiano’s novel. Can you see the street running diagonally through the background map? It is the rue Picpus. In that same edition of the evening newspaper mentioned in the previous blog-post, Paris-soir , on page 2 is the heading: Signé Picpus . It is an instalment from a serialised novel by Georges Simenon with his famous detective, Maigret as the main character.  What is the significance of Picpus for these two writers of mystery? Looking forward to hearing your literary detective discoveries... In the mean time, please re-read last week's post on Patrick Modiano and literary detective work at  Read last week's blog post   A 3-Step activity for travel writers online starts in the post for 28th October 2022. Please Follow this blog below to be sure you do not miss Step 1... 

English-language readers will be pleased to hear that another of Patrick Modiano’s novels has been translated from French and is available in the UK. If, like me, and my blog followers, you have become addicted to Modiano’s writing then this next one should be a real treat.  The original French version, called L’herbe des nuits has been around in paperback since May 2014, its literal translation would have been, well, Nights’ Grass , Night Grasses , the story itself holds a clue as the narrator searches for the lost words of a manuscript from the 1960s, one is put in mind of the lines from a poem by Mandelstam:   'What pain - hunting for the lost word, lifting these sore eyelids,   And, with lime in your blood, gathering night grasses for alien tribes'                                                           From Osip Mandelstam's poem 'January 1, 1924' But my interest is that Modiano’s novel may unlock literary tourism to the book’s opening location in Paris, t