Non-Fiction Books

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. “I am writing these pages the way one compiles a report or a résumé,” he writes, “as documentation and to have done with a life that was not my own.” Termed one of his finest books by the Guardian , Pedigree is both a personal exploration and a 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 world of his neglectful parents under the German Occupation; his childhood in a household of circus performers and gangsters; his harsh boarding school, which catered to “bastards, lost children”; and his formative friendship with the writer Raymond Queneau. While acknowledging that memory is never assured, Modiano recalls with painful clarity the death of his ten-year-old brother, Rudy. Pedigree , Modiano’s only memoir, is a gift to his readers and a master key to the themes that have inspired his writing life.

Published in English for the first time, 28 Paradises is the marriage of prose and painting by Nobel-prize winning author Patrick Modiano and his partner, the illustrator Dominique Zehrfuss. 28 Paradises is a rare book: it reveals not only the individual talents of the authors, Modiano and Zehrfuss, but also the depth of the couple’s creative union. Sensitively translated into English for the first time by Damion Searls, 28 Paradises captures the exquisite sadness of waking from a beautiful dream. There are twenty-eight dreams in this book, or perhaps one dream in twenty-eight parts—visions of paradise imagined by Zehrfuss during a time of deep sadness. Captured first in Zehrfuss’s brightly colored gouaches, each paradise was then refashioned as a poem by Modiano. Zehrfuss’s paintings are Edens in miniature, and rather than describe them outright, Modiano dreams himself into these reveries in quiet, understated verse. The reader enters this shared realm in an experience less like paging through a book and more like slipping into a shared world. These paradises are wishes for moments when a painting, or a poem, or a lover—perhaps they are not so different—relieves the loneliness of being human. As Modiano writes with a touch of wistfulness, “The Lilliputian painted her paradises / And I / Next to her / Wrote a poem.” A pure example of ekphrastic writing—poetry inspired by paintings—this book shows how writing and visual art can together create a unique emotional experience. First published by Editions de l’Olivier/ Le Seuil in 2005

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE, 2014 Haunted by the fate of Dora Bruder – a fifteen-year-old girl listed as missing in an old December 1941 issue of Paris Soir – Nobel Prize-winning author Patrick Modiano sets out to find all he can about her. From her name on a list of deportees to Auschwitz to the fragments he is able to uncover about the Bruder family, Modiano delivers a moving survey of a decade-long investigation that revived for him the sights, sounds and sorrowful rhythms of occupied Paris. And in seeking to exhume Dora Bruder's fate, he in turn faces his own family history. Translated by Joanna Kilmartin ‘Absolutely magnificent’ Le Monde