Pedigree

"It's a book less on what I did than on what others, mainly my parents, did to me"

Taking in a vast gallery of extraordinary characters from Paris' post-war years, Pedigree is an autobiographical portrait of Post-War Paris and a tumultuous childhood - a childhood replete with insecurity and sorrow that informed the oeuvre of France's Nobel Laureate.

With his sometime-actress mother and shady businessman father barely functioning in any parental role, the young Modiano spent his childhood being packed off to the care of others, or held at a safe distance in a grimy boarding school - which he ran away from several times. His impecunious mother had "a heart of stone"; his womanising father once called the police when his son asked him for money, and later ceased all contact with him.

But for all his parents' indifference, it is the death of his younger brother when Modiano is eleven that cuts deepest, leaving a wound that can never be healed.

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.