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Description of  Pedigree: A Memoir (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

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 Modianos fraught relationship with memory and the pasthis own and those of his country."Kaiama L. Gloverdec, 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 yearsshadowy 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 , is both a personal exploration and a luminous portrait of a world gone by. sheds light on the childhood and adolescence that Modiano explores in 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. , Modianos only memoir, is a gift to his readers and a master key to the themes that have inspired his writing life. Read more