Pedigree
A Memoir
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
In this rare glimpse into the life of Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano, the author takes up his pen to tell his personal story. He addresses his early years—shadowy times in postwar Paris that haunt his memory and have inspired his world-cherished body of fiction. In the spare, absorbing, and sometimes dreamlike prose that translator Mark Polizzotti captures unerringly, Modiano offers a memoir of his first twenty-one years. Termed one of his “finest books” by the Guardian, Pedigree is both a personal exploration and a luminous portrait of a world gone by.
Pedigree sheds light on the childhood and adolescence that Modiano explores in Suspended Sentences, Dora Bruder, and other novels. In this work he re-creates the louche, unstable, colorful world of his parents under the German Occupation; his childhood in a household of circus performers and gangsters; and his formative friendship with the writer Raymond Queneau. While acknowledging that memory is never assured, Modiano recalls with painful clarity the most haunting moments of his early life, such as the death of his ten-year-old brother. Pedigree, Modiano’s only memoir, is a gift to his readers and a master key to the themes that have inspired his writing life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Modiano, winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize for literature, recounts, in laconic, clear-eyed prose, his youth and coming of age in post-WWII Paris. Modiano, the son of a cold, hard actress mother and a shady black marketeer father, did not enjoy an idyllic childhood. His parents generally lived apart, while Modiano (whose one sibling, Rudy, died young) grew up in genteel poverty, bouncing from boarding school to boarding school in a haze of deprivation and discipline. Perhaps to compensate, he turned to literature, and he lists the books he was reading at various points The Last of the Mohicans, The Jungle Book, Manon Lescaut, Diary of a Country Priest, and Wuthering Heights as if these formed his character as much as if not more than his largely absent parents. The specter of the Holocaust and WWII hovers over the narrative, especially as Modiano's father was Jewish and had been caught up in the turbulence of occupied Paris (readers of Modiano's Dora Bruder will recognize several incidents from that narrative.) Modiano provides as many questions as explications in this slim but potent volume, as he grapples with the ghosts of the past and the events that shaped the man and writer he would become.
