Paris in July 2025 – Delightful reads by Antoine Laurain

For Paris in July this year, I want to read an actual Parisian author writing Parisian stories. I did some digging and found Antoine Laurain. I’m late to the party, for Laurain has written more than a dozen books, which have been translated into twenty languages, an award-winning novelist whose talents are multi-faceted: author, journalist, screenwriter, film director, antique collector and dealer.

I’ve read or listened to four of Laurain’s novels in the past weeks: The Red Notebook (2014), The President’s Hat (2012), The Readers’ Room (2020), and The French Windows (2024). I still have many more to savour. These ones I’ve read are all like novellas, less than 200 pages, each unique in its storyline, very entertaining, easily accessible but not shallow. Laurain’s writing is a fusion of the literary and the popular, weaving suspense and romance, or adding a dash of magical realism as in The President’s Hat. Among these four, The Red Notebook is my favourite.

The Red Notebook by Antoine Laurain, Gallic Books (English edition), 2015,
159 pages.

Ahh… The contentment of being sought and found… and to be known.

Laurent, a bookstore owner, finds a woman’s leather handbag in good condition on top of a garbage bin on the street one morning, obviously stolen and discarded there. He takes it to the police station, but is told to wait. Doesn’t have time to spare, Laurent decides to leave it till the next day to hand it in. The mauve handbag is just too much of a lure for Laurent to keep his curiosity in check. That night at home, he opens it gingerly and explores the personal effects inside, hoping to find a name and address so he can return it to its owner.

Among the perfume, hair clip, keys, and numerous other items, there’s a red Moleskin notebook. Just too tempting, how can he not open it? The elegant and fluid handwriting records the owner’s self-reflections, her likes, her fears, her dream.

He had opened a door into the soul of the woman with the mauve bag and even though he felt what he was doing was inappropriate, he couldn’t stop himself from reading on.

It could sound creepy, but Laurain lets his readers empathize with this curious middle-age bookseller, for he is now a detective of the soul. And Laurain knows how to tell his story with humour. As he searches the bag, his girlfriend shows up, complicating matters. Later, adding zest to his quest, his daughter joins in his detective work readily and offers invaluable assistance.

Augmenting Laurent’s eagerness to find the owner of the bag himself instead of letting it go to the police is another object in the handbag, the book Accident Nocturne signed and with a line of dedication handwritten by the French author and Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano. The bookseller is overcome by a surge of passion, for Modiano is his favourite writer. Herein lies the clue to someone who shares the same mind as his. From the line of inscription, Laurent knows the first name of the owner of the bag, Laure.

While ordinary love stories might focus on a person looking for the right one to love, here in The Red Notebook, it describes the complementary side of the search as well, by revealing the one aspect which might be the most gratifying of true love: being sought and found… and to be known.

I like the idea of a man going to so much trouble to find me (no one has ever gone to so much trouble for me before)

While Laure has had men in her life before, but there has never been one who had really stepped inside her mind. Yet here is one stranger who has known and admired her inner being, and is passionate enough to go the distance to find her, and yet…

The ‘and yet…’ is purposely unwritten as I don’t want to give any spoilers. I highly recommend The Red Notebook as a light and entertaining read, one that touches that soft spot of the human heart, to be sought and found… and deeply known.

I await a filmmaker to take this up, write an English screen adaptation and set in New York City, find a perfect cast, and I’m sure it will make one marvellous rom com, or a little more serious but equally heartwarming rom dramedy.

Ah… Celine Song, would you be interested?

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Paris in July 2025 is hosted by Words and Peace and France Book Tours