Patrick Modiano: Pedigree: A Memoir

Perhaps all those people, whom I met during the 1960s and never saw again, are still living in a kind of parallel world, impervious to time, with the same faces as back in those days. I was thinking of this a short while ago, on a deserted street, in the sun. “You are in Paris with the examining magistrate,” as Apollinaire said in his poem. And the magistrate shows me photos, documents, evidence. And yet, my life — that wasn’t exactly it.

The spring of 1967. The lawns of the Cité Universitaire. The Parc Montsouris. At noon, the workers from the SNECMA aviation plant gathered at the café on the ground floor of the building. Place des Peupliers, on the afternoon in June when I learned they’d accepted my first book. The SNECMA plant at night, like a huge cargo ship run aground on Boulevard Kellermann.

One June evening at the Théâtre de l’Atelier on Place Dancourt. A curious play by Audiberti: Coeur à cuire. Roger worked at the Atelier as stage manager. The evening of Roger and Chantal’s wedding, I had dined with them in the small apartment of someone whose name I don’t remember, on that same Place Dancourt where the light shimmers from the street lamps. Then they had driven away toward the outer suburbs.

That evening, I felt unburdened for the first time in my life. The threat that had weighed on me for so many years, kept me on edge, had dissolved in the Paris air. I had set sail before the worm-eaten wharf could collapse. It was time.

PATRICK MODIANO, winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born in Boulogne-Billancourt, France, in 1945, and was educated in Annecy and Paris. He published his first novel, La Place de l’Etoile , in 1968. In 1978, he was awarded the Prix Goncourt for Rue des Boutiques Obscures (published in English as Missing Person ), and in 1996 he received the Grand Prix National des Lettres for his body of work. Modiano’s other writings include a book-length interview with the writer Emmanuel Berl and, with Louis Malle, the screenplay for Lacombe Lucien.

MARK POLIZZOTTI’S books include the collaborative novel S. (1991), Lautréamont Nomad (1994), Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995; rev. ed., 2009), Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados (British Film Institute, 2006), and Bob Dylan: Highway 61 Revisited (Continuum, 2006). His articles and reviews have appeared in the New Republic , the Wall Street Journal, ARTnews , the Nation, Parnassus, Partisan Review, Bookforum , and elsewhere. The translator of more than forty books from the French, including works by Patrick Modiano, Gustave Flaubert, Marguerite Duras, André Breton, Raymond Roussel, and Jean Echenoz, he directs the publications program at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.