Sleep of Memory
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
The newest best-seller by Patrick Modiano is a beautiful tapestry that brings together memory, esoteric encounters, and fragmented sensations
Patrick Modiano’s first book since his 2014 Nobel Prize revisits moments of the author’s past to produce a spare yet moving reflection on the destructive underside of love, the dreams and follies of youth, the vagaries of memory, and the melancholy of loss.
Writing from the perspective of an older man, the narrator relives a key period in his life through his relationships with several enigmatic women—Geneviève, Martine, Madeleine, a certain Madame Huberson—in the process unearthing his troubled relationship with his parents, his unorthodox childhood, and the unsettled years of his youth that helped form the celebrated writer he would become. This is classic Modiano, utilizing his signature mix of autobiography and invention to create his most intriguing and intimate book yet.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A classic Modiano novel from its very first scene, which opens on the quays of the Seine in a bookseller's stall, the Nobel winner's latest is a startlingly beautiful excavation of his classic themes. A writer in his 70s looks back and fixates on a few small scenes from his life, noirish minutiae that haunt and captivate him 50 years after the fact. As a young man left largely directionless after years of boarding school and neglect from his selfish and itinerant parents, the narrator meets several women who change the course of his interior life. Among them are Genevi ve Dalame, a charming woman from an equally complicated family; Madeleine P raud, a mystic who hosts him in her lavish apartment to discuss their shared fascination with the occult; and Martine Hayward, a friend who has committed a violent crime and needs someone with whom she can disappear for a while. The narrator is good at disappearing, flitting in and out of people's lives, as are each of these women, and after five decades, he still cannot shake the impressions of small moments with each of them, the simultaneous intensity and commonplace-ness of running into one of them on the street. Modiano sharply chronicles the intricate geographies of Paris, and the intimacies and legacies of fleeting scenes that happen within it: "Many paths led away from that crossing, and I had neglected one, perhaps the best of all.... Paris is studded with nerve centers and the many forms our lives might have taken." For fans and newcomers alike, this is Modiano at his very best.
