Sleep of Memory

by Patrick Modiano, Mark Polizzotti (Translator)

Overview

The newest best-seller by Patrick Modiano is a beautiful tapestry that brings together memory, esoteric encounters, and fragmented sensations

Patrick Modiano’s first novel 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300248586
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	01/07/2020
Series:	Margellos World Republic of Letters Series
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	136
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.60(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Internationally renowned author Patrick Modiano has received many prestigious literary awards, among them the 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature. Mark Polizzotti is the translator of more than fifty books from the French, including eight by Modiano.

Editorial Reviews

Memories from some fifty years before return . . . blurring the lines between reality, dreams, and fiction. These are dark, at times violent recollections . . . but [the narrator] maintains a wry wistfulness about the comings and goings of a long life.”—New Yorker

“Sleep of Memory is a throwback to a Paris where life still happened on the terrasses, before everyone retreated into laptops and phones and before time was money, when some happenstance meeting in the morning might turn into an afternoon with an unknown ending.” —Elisabeth Zerofsky, International New York Times

“A splendid, wistful book.”—Olivia de Lamberterie, Elle

“Once again, Modiano masterfully demonstrates the ‘art of memory’ that won him the Nobel and accounts for the engrossing charm of all his work.”—Nelly Kaprièlian, Vogue (France)

“An elegant work of suggestion and misdirection”—Kirkus Reviews

“A dream-like detective tale set in Paris . . . [A] darkly evocative novel of one man's troubling past.”—Michael Autrey, Booklist

“A classic Modiano novel from its very first scene . . . A startlingly beautiful excavation of his classic themes . . . For fans and newcomers alike, this is Modiano at his very best.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“[A] lovely, lilting meditation on memory and loss in mid-20th century Paris . . . [a] resonant novel.”—Nathan Goldman, Literary Hub

“Intimate and important . . . Modiano’s most personal and revelatory book.”—Mary Whipple, Seeing the World Through Books (blog)

“[A] brief, poignant volume . . . [with] a mood ably conveyed by the sensitive and spare translation of Mark Polizzotti . . . It has some of the best aphorisms one can find in Modiano. . . . Sleep of Memory manages to attach a feeling not just of unease but of genuine terror to the past.”—Thomas J. Millay, Los Angeles Review of Books

“Though foreign in every sense of the word, Sleep of Memory beautifully captures the universally ambiguous sensation of recalling a distant memory. This account is for anyone who wonders ‘whether they belonged to reality or the realm of dreams.’"—Zoe Peterson, Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Immensely seductive and haunting . . . I’ve already read this little book three times.”—John Wilson, First Things (“Favorite Books of 2018”)

“Modiano’s signature voice evokes people and place masterfully, stirring readers to reflect on their own experiences and relationships.”—World Literature Today

“Brief but vast and echoing, impossible to summarize, Sleep of Memory is Modiano at his most sublime.”—Luc Sante, author of The Other Paris

"It’s thrilling to read Modiano’s narratives of a cosmic mystery so substantive, yet so personal, that it need not be named.  Though names do appear everywhere, lit up like stars above a dark landscape, mapping locations, naming the players (often with fluid identities) in a shape shifting, yet eternal drama.  In Modiano, mysteries don’t exist to be solved; instead, they are compounded.  I love the metaphorical connotations here of people one might assume have vanished, though 'they only changed neighborhoods.'"—Ann Beattie

"A lapidary master, Modiano compellingly evokes a particular city (Paris) in a historical moment, through the recollections of his idiosyncratic protagonist. Simultaneously illusory and utterly precise, Sleep of Memory reverberates powerfully in the reader's imagination."—Claire Messud, author, most recently, of The Burning Girl

From the Publisher

…Sleep of Memory is a throwback to a Paris where life still happened on the terrasses, before everyone retreated into laptops and phones and before time was money, when some happenstance meeting in the morning might turn into an afternoon with an unknown ending…Modiano owes much to Proust, though his postmodern drifting is far easier to read; there is warmth to be drawn from those unbidden memories, reminiscences of attending a strange party on a cold winter night many years ago conjuring not so much regret as simple pleasure.

The New York Times Book Review - Elisabeth Zerofsky

★ 08/20/2018
A classic Modiano novel from its very first scene, which opens on the quays of the Seine in a bookseller’s stall, the Nobel winner’s latest is a startlingly beautiful excavation of his classic themes. A writer in his 70s looks back—and fixates—on a few small scenes from his life, noirish minutiae that haunt and captivate him 50 years after the fact. As a young man left largely directionless after years of boarding school and neglect from his selfish and itinerant parents, the narrator meets several women who change the course of his interior life. Among them are Geneviève Dalame, a charming woman from an equally complicated family; Madeleine Péraud, a mystic who hosts him in her lavish apartment to discuss their shared fascination with the occult; and Martine Hayward, a friend who has committed a violent crime and needs someone with whom she can disappear for a while. The narrator is good at disappearing, flitting in and out of people’s lives, as are each of these women, and after five decades, he still cannot shake the impressions of small moments with each of them, the simultaneous intensity and commonplace-ness of running into one of them on the street. Modiano sharply chronicles the intricate geographies of Paris, and the intimacies and legacies of fleeting scenes that happen within it: “Many paths led away from that crossing, and I had neglected one, perhaps the best of all.... Paris is studded with nerve centers and the many forms our lives might have taken.” For fans and newcomers alike, this is Modiano at his very best. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

12/01/2018

Paring down his enduring themes and pristine, elusive style to their essentials, Nobel Prize winner Modiano delivers yet another understanding of memory. An older man looks back at several young women he knew when he was coming of age, e.g., sophisticated Madeleine Péraud, lonely Madame Hubersen, and especially Geneviève Dalame, troubled by a difficult brother. He's inspired by a book he spots on the quays, The Time of Encounters, and indeed those were just encounters—these women brushed against him, marking him lightly before disappearing, often simply because they moved to another address. What's more significant for both narrator and reader is the view of a callow young man growing up, recognizing how little his parents matter, and eschewing mentors to find his own way. One shocking event winds its way into the narrative, but as Modiano shows, even shockers are muted by time. VERDICT Transparent reading for happy fans that won't overwhelm new readers.

Library Journal

2018-07-31

A languid, novelistic portrait of the artist—winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 2014—as a young man.

"Those people you often wonder about, whose disappearance is shrouded in mystery, a mystery you'll never be able to solve—you'd be surprised to learn that they simply changed neighborhoods." So writes Modiano (So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood, 2015, etc.), a master of postwar noir, blending Alan Furst's matter-of-fact cynicism with Camus-ian aphorism. Here, he reflects on the era when, not yet 20, it began to dawn on him that women are very interesting creatures and that not everything is as it seems. "In the winter of 1964, in one of those dawn cafés—as I called them—when any hope seems warranted as long as it was still dark, I would meet up with a certain Geneviève Dalame." Geneviève is a woman of parts, into the occult, who knows odd things and people; she lives in a hotel, gets up even earlier than the dawn café-haunting Modiano, and isn't above smuggling interesting things (e.g., the log of an Edith Piaf recording session) out of the office to show him. The time seems fraught with—well, if not danger, then certainly change. As the author observes, it was a time when an old world was drawing to an end and a new one was about to be born, in which people no longer lived in hotels and joined Gurdjieff study groups. Geneviève is not without her own dangers, including a junior-mobster brother who threatens Modiano. And so are other women, one of whom, "whose name I hesitate to write," just happens to "accidentally" shoot a mobster. Half a century later, they are all memories receding into the past, with no madeleine but silence to recall them.

A future biographer won't be able to build much of a timeline of the events Modiano so evocatively describes, relics of a world that no longer exists. An elegant work of suggestion and misdirection.

Kirkus Reviews