Catherine Certitude

Catherine Certitude PDF

Author: Patrick Modiano

Publisher: David R. Godine Publisher

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 76

ISBN-13: 9780879239596

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Watching her daughter attempt some jazz steps in her ballet school on a snowy afternoon in New York reminds Catherine of her own childhood in Paris, where she and her rather mysterious father lived happily together.

Patrick Modiano

Patrick Modiano PDF

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2007-01-01

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 9401205256

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While his preoccupation with the period of the Occupation remains a permanent theme, Patrick Modiano is increasingly interested in the exploration of time and memory, and the attendant problem of reconstituting the past. This volume explores all these features. It casts new light on Modiano’s earliest novels, examines afresh his more recent work including his stories for children, situates it in the context of contemporary writing and unravels the intricacies and subtleties of his style. It underlines Modiano’s position as one of France’s major writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and will be of interest to all who are interested in the modern French novel and the complex interactions between fiction and history.

Patrick Modiano

Patrick Modiano PDF

Author: Akane Kawakami

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2015-12-10

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 1781384339

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The most up-to-date and comprehensive critical study of Nobel Prize winning author Patrick Modiano.

A Self-conscious Art

A Self-conscious Art PDF

Author: Akane Kawakami

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2000-01-01

Total Pages: 182

ISBN-13: 9780853235361

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'A Self-Conscious Art' deals with the formal complexities of Modiano's work, by reading 'against the grain' of his self-professed ingenuousness. A detailed examination of his narratives shows the deeply postmodern nature of his writing. Parodying precursors such as Proust or the nouveau romanciers, his narratives are built around a profound lack of faith in the ability of writing to retrieve the past through memory, and this failure is acknowledged in the discreet playfulness that characterises his novels.

Violent Histories

Violent Histories PDF

Author: David Gascoigne

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 9783039103171

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This volume presents selected papers from the conference 'Violence, Culture and Identity' held at St Andrews University in 2003. It seeks to explore the ways in which French writing since 1920 has registered and reflected on the violent national traumas of the World Wars, the Occupation and decolonisation. The essays consider how these crises have led French writers to a critical, often painful reassessment of national, cultural and individual identity. Contributors trace the different challenges offered to any comfortable consensual notions of Frenchness, and to the structures of authority which invest in such a consensus. A recurrent preoccupation is the problematic issue of 'memory culture', especially of how a post-conflict generation copes with an avowed or concealed inheritance of violence and guilt. The thematics, ethics, rhetoric and imagery of violence are charted through debates around surrealism and in writings by major figures, such as Malraux, Sartre, Camus, Genet and Modiano, while a final group of essays looks closely at how a new wave within the popular roman noir genre (the 'néo-polar') engages emphatically and controversially with these issues and their political implications.

Missing Person

Missing Person PDF

Author: Patrick Modiano

Publisher: David R. Godine Publisher

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13: 9781567922813

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In this strange, elegant novel, winner of France's premier literary prize the Prix Goncourt, Patrick Modiano portrays a man in pursuit of the identity he lost in the murky days of the Paris Occupation, the black hole of French memory. For ten years Guy Roland has lived without a past. His current life and name were given to him by his recently retired boss, Hutte, who welcomed him, a onetime client, into his detective agency. Guy makes full use of Hutte's files "€" directories, yearbooks, and papers of all kinds going back half a century "€" but his leads are few. Could he really be the person in that photograph, a young man remembered by some as a South American attach? Or was he someone else, perhaps the disappeared scion of a prominent local family? He interviews strangers and is tantalized by half-clues until, at last, he grasps a thread that leads him through the maze of his own repressed experience. On one level Missing Person is a detective thriller, a 1950s film noir mix of smoky cafs, illegal passports, and insubstantial figures crossing bridges in the fog. On another level, it is also a haunting meditation on the nature of the self. Modiano's sparce, hypnotic prose, superbly translated by Daniel Weissbort, draws his readers into the intoxication of a rare literary experience.

Sleep of Memory

Sleep of Memory PDF

Author: Patrick Modiano

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2018-10-16

Total Pages: 133

ISBN-13: 0300240473

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The newest best-seller by Patrick Modiano is a beautiful tapestry that brings together memory, esoteric encounters, and fragmented sensations Patrick Modiano’s first book since his 2014 Nobel Prize revisits moments of the author’s past to produce a spare yet moving reflection on the destructive underside of love, the dreams and follies of youth, the vagaries of memory, and the melancholy of loss. Writing from the perspective of an older man, the narrator relives a key period in his life through his relationships with several enigmatic women—Geneviève, Martine, Madeleine, a certain Madame Huberson—in the process unearthing his troubled relationship with his parents, his unorthodox childhood, and the unsettled years of his youth that helped form the celebrated writer he would become. This is classic Modiano, utilizing his signature mix of autobiography and invention to create his most intriguing and intimate book yet.

After the Circus

After the Circus PDF

Author: Patrick Modiano

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2015-01-01

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 0300215894

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A classic novel from recent Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano, now available to English-language readers in a superb new translation One of the hallmarks of French author Patrick Modiano's writing is a singular ability to revisit particular motifs and episodes, infusing each telling with new detail and emotional nuance. In this evocative novel the internationally acclaimed author takes up one of his most compelling themes: a love affair with a woman who disappears, and a narrator grappling with the mystery of a relationship stopped short. Set in mid-sixties Paris, After the Circus traces the relationship between the narrator, a young man not quite of legal age, and the slightly older, enigmatic woman he first glimpses at a police interrogation. The two lovers make their uncertain way into each other's hearts, but the narrator soon finds himself in the unsettling, ominous presence of others. Who are these people? Are they real, or simply evoked? Part romance, part detective story, this mesmerizing book fully demonstrates Modiano's signature use of atmosphere and suggestion as he investigates the perils and the exhilaration of young love.

Family Record

Family Record PDF

Author: Patrick Modiano

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2019-09-24

Total Pages: 157

ISBN-13: 0300248830

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An enthralling reflection on the ways that family history influences identity, from the 2014 Nobel laureate for literature A mix of autobiography and lucid invention, this highly personal work offers a deeply affecting exploration of the meaning of identity and pedigree. With his signature blend of candor, mystery, and bewitching elusiveness, Patrick Modiano weaves together a series of interlocking stories from his family history: his parents’ courtship in occupied Paris; a sinister hunting trip with his father; a chance friendship with the deposed King Farouk; a wistful affair with the daughter of a nightclub singer; and the author’s life as a new parent. Modiano’s riveting vignettes, filled with a coterie of dubious characters—Nazi informants, collaborationist refugees, and black-market hustlers—capture the drama that consumed Paris during World War II and its aftermath. Written in tones ranging from tender nostalgia to the blunt cruelty of youth, this is a personal and revealing book that brings the enduring significance of a complicated past to life.

Scene of the Crime

Scene of the Crime PDF

Author: Patrick Modiano

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2023-01-17

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 0300268874

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A haunting novel that probes the enigmas of time and memory, by Nobel Prize–winning author Patrick Modiano “Polizzotti’s crisp and evocative translation keeps the reader hooked.”—Publishers Weekly In his acclaimed semi-autobiographical novella Suspended Sentences, Patrick Modiano recounted a dramatic season in his childhood, of the home he shared with sinister surrogate parents, the mysterious events that took place there, and an infamous heist that was never solved. In Scene of the Crime, Modiano conjures the aftermath of those years. A decade has passed, and Jean Bosmans, now in his early twenties, becomes aware of a set of disturbing coincidences involving an elusive woman, his childhood home, and a host of disquieting characters who seem inordinately interested in his past, for reasons he can’t fathom. As he journeys into the echoes of memory, past and present become increasingly intertwined, forming a web spanning half a century. With the taut suspense of a detective novel, this book slowly peels away layers of time and forgetfulness to reveal the haunting, threatening, ultimately tragic legacies of what we think we know about our lives.