AUDIOBOOK
About
In this essential trilogy of novellas by the winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature, French author Patrick Modiano reaches back in time, opening the corridors of memory and exploring the mysteries to be encountered there. Each novella in the volume-Afterimage, Suspended Sentences, and Flowers of Ruin-represents a sterling example of the author's originality and appeal, while Mark Polizzotti's superb English-language translations capture not only Modiano's distinctive narrative voice but also the matchless grace and spare beauty of his prose.Although originally published separately, Modiano's three novellas form a single, compelling whole, haunted by the same gauzy sense of place and characters. Modiano draws on his own experiences, blended with the real or invented stories of others, to present a dreamlike autobiography that is also the biography of a place. Orphaned children, mysterious parents, forgotten friends, enigmatic strangers-all appear in this three-part love song to a Paris that no longer exists.Shadowed by the dark period of the Nazi Occupation, these novellas reveal Modiano's fascination with the lost, obscure, or mysterious: a young person's confusion over adult behavior; the repercussions of a chance encounter; the search for a missing father; the aftershock of a fatal affair. To read Modiano's trilogy is to enter his world of uncertainties and the almost accidental way in which people find their fates.
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Reviews
"Reading Modiano is like experiencing a very specific flavor you don't encounter every day-saffron or asafetida, say. He's direct and precise but also gently melancholy, like the squeezed essence of passing time. Mark Polizzotti's translation expertly catches the timbre of his voice."
Luc Sante, award
"Completely, insouciantly, Modiano describes the interiors and essential matter of the French literary imagination. In these fictions, the sworn bewilderment of intimacy as cause and quest and actual topography of narrative becomes an inexhaustible source. And from that source there flows a riverine voice of legends and documentary legerdemain: always candid, always fitly perplexed. In the three n
Donald Revell, author of Pennyweight Windows
"Haunting. Like a master perfumer, Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano has crafted a signature scent: his unmistakable blend of nostalgia, grief, love, disquiet, Paris."
Damion Searls, award