Pedigree: A Memoir Contributor(s): Modiano, Patrick (Author), Polizzotti, Mark (Translator) |
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ISBN: 0300223617 ISBN-13: 9780300223613 Publisher: Yale University Press OUR PRICE: $13.50 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: October 2016 |
Additional Information |
BISAC Categories: - Biography & Autobiography | Literary Figures - Biography & Autobiography | Personal Memoirs - History | Europe - France |
Dewey: B |
Series: Margellos World Republic of Letters |
Physical Information: 0.5" H x 4.6" W x 7.5" (0.25 lbs) 144 pages |
Themes: - Chronological Period - 20th Century - Cultural Region - French |
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
Publisher Description: Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano has said that his many fictions are all variations of the same story. Pedigree, his memoir, is the theme. "Terse, yet somehow infinitely generous, Pedigree both enacts and accounts for Modiano's fraught relationship with memory and the past--his own and those of his country."--Kaiama L. Gloverdec, New York Times Book Review 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. |