Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
“Reading Modiano is like experiencing a very specific flavor you don’t encounter every day—saffron or asafetida, say. He’s direct and precise, but also gently melancholy, like the squeezed essence of passing time. Mark Polizzotti’s translation expertly catches the timbre of his voice.”—Luc Sante
Review
“Completely, insouciantly, Modiano describes the interiors and essential matter of the French literary imagination. In these fictions, the sworn bewilderment of intimacy as cause and quest and actual topography of narrative becomes an inexhaustible source. And from that source there flows a riverine voice of legends and documentary legerdemain: always candid, always fitly perplexed. In the three novellas gathered as Suspended Sentences, this voice elapses across Paris as it never was, yet somehow must have been. Otherwise, there could be no accounting for acrobats, for Edith Piaf, for collaboration and liberation and the spring of 1968. All of these and more Modiano addresses with a luminous bewilderment more intimately exacting and more precise than any certainty could be.”—Donald Revell, Author of Pennyweight Windows: New & Selected Poems
Review
“The Nobel Prize committee’s abrupt elevation of Patrick Modiano to international prominence makes the publication of these three works particularly valuable; not only has very little of the author’s work appeared in English, but Mark Polizzotti’s long experience as editor, publisher, and translator, together with his truly astonishing familiarity with the French language, has advantageously equipped him to execute his finely-tuned English renderings of these discreetly complex texts. Modiano belongs to one of the great traditions of French fiction, inaugurated by Madame de Lafayette’s The Princess of Cleves, continued (this is a very short list) in Marivaux’s novels, later in Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons and Flaubert’s Three Tales and A Sentimental Education, in the 20th century variously developed by its three great Raymonds – Radiguet, Roussel, and Queneau – and, greatest of all, Marcel Proust, and in our own time flourishing anew in the pages of Patrick Modiano and Jean Echenoz. To the thousands of French readers of Modiano, declaring him a great writer is obvious, necessary, and inexplicable: he and his tradition depend on intimacy, precision, and a ruthless avoidance of reassuring conclusions – that is, modest qualities. Modiano’s tales are mostly centered on life in outlying parts of Paris during and after World War II; place and time are rendered with alluring exactness, as are their fugitive inhabitants, and all are then inevitably lost in a blur of evanescent clues that leave nothing but an hallucinatory melancholy behind: a melancholy that enchants a rediscovered world with mysterious, hopeless magic. Modiano has said of his work, “I have always felt that I’ve been writing the same book for the past 45 years”; but each novel is unflaggingly fresh, with writing of exemplary purity, depending on nothing but itself for the reality it creates. Now, with Suspended Sentences in hand, you can enter this hauntingly vivid new world. I strongly urge you not to let the opportunity pass you by.”—Harry Mathews
Review
Patrick Modiano is the winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature
Review
“Haunting. Like a master perfumer, Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano has crafted a signature scent: his unmistakable blend of nostalgia, grief, love, disquiet, Paris . . .”—Damion Searls
Review
“The three novellas included in this volume by this year’s Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano offer eloquent testimony to the writer’s remarkable gift for evoking the power of the past over human lives and destinies, and the ephemeral and ultimately mysterious nature of human relationships. They also capture Modiano’s unrivaled ability to describe in limpid and haunting prose the power of a place, Paris, and to make its history and geography come alive in new and unexpected ways. Beautifully translated by Mark Polizzotti, this small volume will familiarize Anglophone readers with the talent and genius of France’s best- kept literary secret.”—Richard J. Golsan, Texas A&M University
Review
“Patrick Modiano, that great chronicler of lost souls, is at his masterful best in these three linked short novels, which have been expertly translated by Mark Polizzotti. Memories of places and people from the narrator’s childhood and youth mingle across the years, together with the searing sense that he will never fully understand his own past, nor the stories of his elusive parents, in a Parisi he remembers as still haunted by ghosts of World War II. No living author has rendered the melancholy of incomplete histories and ‘suspended sentences’ more beautifully than Modiano. Already a revered author in France, he is sure to gain world-wide admiration and enthusiastic readers as a result of his well-deserved Nobel Prize for Literature.”—Susan Rubin Suleiman, Harvard University; author of Crises of Memory and the Second World War
Review
"These novellas resemble a cross between metaphysical mystery tale and lyrical memoir. . . . Mark Polizzotti’s translation catches the lilt and tone of Modiano’s singularly evocative prose."—Steven Ungar, University of Iowa
Review
“These three atmospheric novellas demonstrate the range of reading pleasure afforded by Modiano’s approach and the dark romance of his Paris. . . . Each first-person novella is also a portrait of the artist.”—Publishers Weekly
Review
“A timely glimpse at [Modiano’s] fixations . . . In Mark Polizzotti’s spare and elegant translation, the writing conveys a sense of dreamy unease in which the real, the hypothesized, and the half-forgotten blend into a shimmering vagueness.”—Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
Review
"In poetic prose, Modiano evokes a Paris that no longer exists, yet lingers in the light and shadows of memory."—Jane Ciabattari, BBC.com
Review
“Brilliant”—New York Magazine “Approval Matrix”
Review
“Beautiful and fascinating”—M.A. Orthofer, Complete Review
Review
“Haunting. Like a master perfumer, Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano has crafted a signature scent: his unmistakable blend of nostalgia, grief, love, disquiet, Paris. In any translation, exotic décor comes easy but to capture the atmosphere of the words is much harder — Polizzotti succeeds beautifully in creating the impalpable magic of Modiano’s world in English.”—Damion Searls
Review
“These novellas resemble a cross between metaphysical mystery stories and lyrical memoir. Modiano is at his best when his narrators—are they three separate narrators or perhaps only one and the same?—conjure up a remembered childhood inflected by historical figures and real places, from Violette Nozière and Robert Capa to the Drancy transit camp and the Quai d’Austerlitz in Paris. All three stories set the recall of a personal past within the twilight world of elusive father in whose footsteps Modiano’s narrators seem forever to be following. Mark Polizzotti’s translation catches the tone and lilt of a singularly evocative prose.”—Steven Ungar, University of Iowa
Review
“Haunting. . . . Modiano combines a detective’s curiosity with an elegist’s melancholy.”—Adam Kirsch, New Republic
Review
“[A] trilogy of novellas from the recent French Nobel Prize winner. . . . Fictions with a moral bite, depicting a world in which everyone, it seems, is complicit in crimes not yet specified. Moody, elegant and dour.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Review
“The three novellas that make up this exquisite collection are mysteries, albeit mysteries of an existential sort.”—David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times
Review
“[A] welcome translation . . . [Modiano’s] stories include suspenseful passages and are invariably absorbing . . . and offer much to ponder as one proceeds.”—John Taylor, Arts Fuse
Review
'[The novellas] are an excellent introduction to the writer, not least because they show quite how much he retreads the same territory. . .Modiano is as accessible as he is engrossing.'—Jonathan Gibbs,
The IndependentReview
'The three novellas that make up Suspended Sentences offer a fine introduction to Modiano’s later work.'—The Economist
Review
'Modiano is a pure original. He has transformed the novel into a laboratory for producing atmospheres, not situations - where everything must be inferred and nothing can be proved.'—Adam Thirlwell, The Guardian
Review
'. . . a sympathetic translation of three of Modiano’s novellas. . . reveal the unique qualities of his fictional world which has given rise to an adjective in France, “Modianoesque”, meaning an ambiguous person or situation. . . These stories are a kind of mood music, frustratingly inconclusive but unexpectedly stirring.’—David Sexton,
The Evening StandardReview
'. . . the very resonance of the novellas resides in the way Modiano resists supplying easy solutions or proposing a didactic position. The Nobel laureateship has drawn attention to a writer whose work is engaging and thought-provoking. . .’—Alexander Adams, Spiked Online
Review
"English readers seeking an introduction to the author would do well to start with Mark Polizzotti’s diligent translation . . . rendering into English the eerie wistfulness of Mr Modiano’s French, with its soft cadences and subtle movement between tenses. . . . A writer so central to the French literary imagination ought now to take his place on the global stage."—Toby Lichtig, Wall Street Journal European edition
Review
'The novellas are discrete and discontinuous but remarkably coherent. . . they investigate the shape of memory, probing moral and historical complexity with spare, finely honed prose.’—Ruth Scurr,
The SpectatorReview
“Compelling. . . . Haunting. . . . Modiano’s unconventional accounts of vanished hours show how the urge to solve a long-lost crime, or to reclaim forgotten memories, ultimately leads to inscrutable vanishing points.”—Scott Esposito, San Francisco Chronicle
Review
“Striking and poignant.”—Kacy Muir, Weekender
Review
“Vividly translated by Mark Polizzotti . . . [and] as good a place as any to enter the long, slow-moving river of Modiano’s fiction.”—Alan Riding, New York Times Book Review
Review
“An excellent place to begin. . . . Here is the bracing darkness at the heart of Modiano’s vision of memory and modern day Paris, . . . a traveling back to travel forward, a journey these novellas pace with the elegance of a solitary walker, moving through a city’s streets, his collar up against the cold.”—John Freeman, Boston Globe
Review
“There are few modern writers as pleasurable or interesting to read. Modiano is one of the great writers of our time.”—David Herman, Jewish Chronicle
Review
“The three novellas in Suspended Sentences offer a vivid glimpse into Modiano's photographic remembrance of things past.”—Brandon Ambrosino, Vox
Review
“Mr. Modiano writes clear, languid, and urbane sentences in Mr. Polizzotti’s agile translation . . . these novellas have a mood. They cast a spell.”—Dwight Garner,
New York TimesReview
“Like [W.G.] Sebald, Modiano blends fact and fiction, memoir and reportage . . . obsessed with unearthing lives buried under the avalanche of time.”—Ryu Spaeth, the Week
Review
“Mesmerizing . . . evocative and nostalgic . . . These are stories that continue to haunt, even after the final page . . . For English-language readers, this collection serves as the discovery of a unique, masterful writer.”—Gila Wertheimer, Chicago Jewish Star
Review
“A series of meditations on the mutability of memory . . . [that] accumulates force quietly and veers without warning into the dark precincts of Modiano’s life. . . . The writing, translated crisply by Mark Polizzotti, is laced with investigations and speculations, false leads and dead ends.”—Bill Morris, Daily Beast
Review
“Elegant . . . quietly unpretentious, approachable . . . Though enigmatic and open-ended, Modiano’s remembrances of things past and his probings of personal identity are presented with a surprisingly light touch. He is, all in all, quite an endearing Nobelist.”—Michael Dirda, Washington Post
Review
“Quite a pedigree has this ever-more-fascinating Nobel Prize-winner.”—James Campbell, TLS
Review
“Joy Castro’s writing is like watching an Acapulco cliff diver. It takes my breath away every time.”—Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street
Review
“I love the stories in How Winter Began: the taut narratives, the deft portrayal of characters who, though vulnerable, are stunning in their fierce determination. Reading, I had very physical reactions—sharp intakes of breath, stinging eyes, tightening scalp, adrenaline. It was like being gut-punched again and again, but in a very good way.”—Lorraine López, author of Homicide Survivors Picnic and Other Stories
Review
“These masterful and moving stories whisk us to the brittle edge, the place where pain splinters the husk from which understanding emerges.”—Lorraine López, author of Homicide Survivors Picnic, and Other Stories
Review
“Bryn Chancellor is an amazing, sensitive, and thoughtful writer. . . . The depth on display in these carefully crafted, emotionally resonant stories is staggering.”—Kevin Wilson, author of Tunneling to the Center of the Earth and The Family Fang
Review
“When Are You Coming Home? is a knockout! These nine stories turned me into an emotional pinball, zinging from humor to heartbreak and back again. Bryn Chancellor is the real thing, a true artist and one hell of a storyteller.” —Tayari Jones, author of Silver Sparrow
Review
“The three novellas in this book show a consistent, inherently logical artistic vision—a sign of a great writer. Modiano's sadness, expressed in his sparseness of style and in obsessive leitmotif connections, is unique.”—Aleksandar Hemon, The Week
Review
“In this slim but potent volume . . . [Modiano] grapples with the ghosts of the past and the events that shaped the man and writer he would become.”—Publishers Weekly
Review
“For those familiar with and interested in Modiano's fiction, Pedigree is essential reading”—M.A.Orthofer, Complete Review
Review
“[Pedigree] makes a powerful, lasting impression.”—Michael Autrey, Booklist
Review
“Compelling . . . highly effective . . . Mr. Modiano depends for effect not on rhetorical declaration or emotional outburst but on the accumulation of minor details. He is a writer unlike any other and a worthy recipient of the Nobel.”—James Campbell, Wall Street Journal
Synopsis
A trio of intertwined novellas from one of the most evocative French authors writing today
Synopsis
A trio of intertwined novellas from the 2014 Nobel laureate for literature
In this essential trilogy of novellas by the winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature, French author Patrick Modiano reaches back in time, opening the corridors of memory and exploring the mysteries to be encountered there. Each novella in the volume--Afterimage, Suspended Sentences, and Flowers of Ruin--represents a sterling example of the author's originality and appeal, while Mark Polizzotti's superb English-language translations capture not only Modiano's distinctive narrative voice but also the matchless grace and spare beauty of his prose.
Although originally published separately, Modiano's three novellas form a single, compelling whole, haunted by the same gauzy sense of place and characters. Modiano draws on his own experiences, blended with the real or invented stories of others, to present a dreamlike autobiography that is also the biography of a place. Orphaned children, mysterious parents, forgotten friends, enigmatic strangers--each appears in this three-part love song to a Paris that no longer exists.
Shadowed by the dark period of the Nazi Occupation, these novellas reveal Modiano's fascination with the lost, obscure, or mysterious: a young person's confusion over adult behavior; the repercussions of a chance encounter; the search for a missing father; the aftershock of a fatal affair. To read Modiano's trilogy is to enter his world of uncertainties and the almost accidental way in which people find their fates.
Synopsis
"Elegant. Unpretentious. Approachable. . . . He is, all in all, quite an endearing Nobelist."--Michael Dirda, Washington Post "Modiano is a pure original."--Adam Thirlwell, The Guardian
"A fine introduction to Modiano's later work."--The Economist
"These novellas have a mood. They cast a spell."--Dwight Garner, New York Times
In this essential trilogy of novellas by the winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature, French author Patrick Modiano reaches back in time, opening the corridors of memory and exploring the mysteries to be encountered there. Each novella in the volume--Afterimage, Suspended Sentences, and Flowers of Ruin--represents a sterling example of the author's originality and appeal, while Mark Polizzotti's superb English-language translations capture not only Modiano's distinctive narrative voice but also the matchless grace and spare beauty of his prose.
Although originally published separately, Modiano's three novellas form a single, compelling whole, haunted by the same gauzy sense of place and characters. Modiano draws on his own experiences, blended with the real or invented stories of others, to present a dreamlike autobiography that is also the biography of a place. Orphaned children, mysterious parents, forgotten friends, enigmatic strangers--each appears in this three-part love song to a Paris that no longer exists.
Shadowed by the dark period of the Nazi Occupation, these novellas reveal Modiano's fascination with the lost, obscure, or mysterious: a young person's confusion over adult behavior; the repercussions of a chance encounter; the search for a missing father; the aftershock of a fatal affair. To read Modiano's trilogy is to enter his world of uncertainties and the almost accidental way in which people find their fates.
Synopsis
Although originally published separately, Patrick Modiano's three novellas form a single, compelling whole, haunted by the same gauzy sense of place and characters. Modiano draws on his own experiences, blended with the real or invented stories of others, to present a dreamlike autobiography that is also the biography of a place. Orphaned children, mysterious parents, forgotten friends, enigmatic strangers -- each appears in this three-part love song to a Paris that no longer exists. In this superb English-language translation of
Afterimage,
Suspended Sentences, and
Flowers of Ruin, Mark Polizzotti captures not only Modiano's distinctive narrative voice but also the matchless grace and spare beauty of his prose.
Shadowed by the dark period of the Nazi Occupation, these novellas reveal Modiano's fascination with the lost, obscure, or mysterious: a young person's confusion over adult behavior; the repercussions of a chance encounter; the search for a missing father; the aftershock of a fatal affair. To read Modiano's trilogy is to enter his world of uncertainties and the almost accidental way in which people find their fates.
Synopsis
A trio of intertwined novellas from the 2014 Nobel laureate for literature
Synopsis
Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano admits that his many fictions are all variations of the same story. Pedigree is the theme.
Synopsis
Iréne gives the wealthy businessmen what they want, diving headfirst into the filthy river, thinking only of providing for her baby daughter, Marisa, as the men salivate over her soaked body emerging onto the bank. A young boy tries to befriend the reticent younger sister of the town’s cruelest bully, only to discover the family betrayal behind her quiet countenance. Josefa, a young bride, is executed for murdering the man who raped her. Joy Castro’s How Winter Began traces these and other characters as they seek compassion from each other and themselves.
Thematically linked by the lives of women, especially Latinas, and their experiences of poverty and violence in a white-dominated, wealth-obsessed culture, How Winter Began is a delicately wrought collection of stories. The question at the heart of this riveting book is how or whether to trust one another after the rupture of betrayal.
Synopsis
Humans have always connected deeply to the idea of home. In Bryn Chancellor’s nine stories, home means, in part, the physical spaces: the buildings, cities and towns, the fragile, imperious landscapes of the region. But home is also profoundly rooted in intangibles. Set in urban and rural Arizona, home, for the characters in these stories, is love—familial, romantic, and unrequited. It is loss and grief. It is the memories that surface late at night. It is mystery and longing and a shining flicker of hope.
In the title story, a locksmith prowls empty houses and befriends a young mother as he and his wife grapple with a tragedy perpetrated by their son. During an overseas trip, a daughter grieving for her father struggles with her mother’s altered appearance; an irrigation worker meets a troubled teenage girl in the darkness of her flooded yard; and a daughter and her estranged, ailing mother stay in a dilapidated cabin while a mountain lion stalks the woods. Through chance meetings between strangers, collisions within families, and confrontations with the self, these characters leave and return, time and again, trying desperately to find their way home.
About the Author
A conversation with translator Mark Polizzotti
Pedigree is a late work for Patrick Modiano that deals with his youth. What do we learn about him?
Several things that I believe are essential to understanding Modiano’s fictions. First, just how closely certain key recurring episodes in his novels are patterned on real events from his early life, and how profoundly they have shaped his sensibility. But also we learn about the context in which he grew up. For instance, certain areas of Paris—the Bois de Boulogne, or particular streets in the 6th or 16th arrondissement—show up frequently in his works; this memoir gives the backstory. More significantly, Modiano alludes in various novels to his problematic relations with his absentee mother and distant but controlling father; only after reading Pedigree did I truly grasp that complicated and heartbreaking dynamic.
Winning the Nobel Prize in 2014 certainly changed the fortune of Modiano’s literary career. How do you see his work in the tradition of Nobel laureates?
One of the things that most appeals to me about Modiano’s writing is its apparent modesty—or rather, its ability to treat some of the great issues of the twentieth century, such as human responsibility in times of crisis or the vicissitudes of identity, without grandstanding or self-conscious profundity. Unlike many Nobel winners, his work does not proclaim its importance, but instead remains on a personal, human scale; the more universal significance of his writings is read, as it were, between the lines. This deceptively simple, “local” quality makes his work, to my mind, much more accessible and enjoyable to read than the works of many recent laureates—but no less deserving of the honor.