Pedigree: A Memoir.

First Edition of Patrick Modiano's Memoir Pedigree; Inscribed by Him

Pedigree: A Memoir.

MODIANO, Patrick.

Item Number: 60054

New Have: Yale University Press, 2015.

First edition in English of Modiano’s memoir. Octavo, original boards. Warmly inscribed by Patrick Modiano on the half-title page. Fine in a fine dust jacket. Translated by Mark Polizzotti.

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. "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. It outlines the stakes of his literary practice and reveals the specific sufferings this practice entails" (Kaiama L. Gloverdec, New York Times Book Review).

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