Sleep of memory

Patrick Modiano, 1945-

Book - 2018

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.

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Subjects
Genres
Novels
Published
New Haven, Connecticut : Yale University Press [2018]
Language
English
French
Main Author
Patrick Modiano, 1945- (author)
Other Authors
Mark Polizzotti (translator)
Item Description
Translation of: Souvenirs dormants.
Physical Description
124 pages ; 21 cm
ISBN
9780300238303
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

LATE-LIFE LOVE: A Memoir, by Susan Gubar. (Norton, $25.95.) The influential literary critic blends tales of her marriage, her cancer treatments and her husband's age-related infirmities with discussions of works whose meaning has changed for her over time; her rereadings confirm her talents as a teacher. MORTAL REPUBLIC: How Rome Fell Into Tyranny, by Edward J. Watts. (Basic, $32.) By the second century B.C., the proud Roman Republic had been brought low by inequity, corruption and populist politicians. Since America's founders modeled it on the Roman example, Watts, a historian, warns that it behooves us to understand what went wrong over 2,000 years ago. MUHAMMAD: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires, by Juan Cole. (Nation, $28.) Cole offers an ambitiously revisionist picture of the father of Islam, replacing the idea of a militant leader with one of a peacemaker who wanted only to preach his monotheism freely and even sought "multicultural" harmony. INSURRECTO, by Gina Apostol. (Soho, $26.) Set in the Philippines, this novel raises provocative questions about history and hypocrisy as it follows two women with dueling modern-day film scripts about a colonial-era massacre. MY BROTHER'S HUSBAND: Volume 2, by Gengoroh Tagamé. Translated by Anne Ishii. (Pantheon, $25.95.) A sweet satire of Japan's taboo against gay marriage, this manga-style graphic novel is a sophisticated investigation into the nature of love, marriage, divorce, bereavement and nontraditional child-rearing. IN OUR MAD AND FURIOUS CITY, by Guy Gunaratne. (MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, paper, $16.) Gunaratne's striking, Bookerlonglisted debut unfolds over a few restless days in a workingclass Northwest London suburb. Despite the rush of drama indicated by its title, the book should be read for its quieter details - Gunaratne, with a gift for characterization, presents the kinds of Londoners not often seen in contemporary fiction. THE DAY THE SUN DIED, by Yan Lianke. Translated by Carlos Rojas. (Grove, $26.) This brutal satirical novel takes place on a single night, when a plague of somnambulism unleashes a host of suppressed emotions among the inhabitants of a Chinese village. The ensuing chaos is promptly struck from the official record. TELL THEM OF BATTLES, KINGS, AND ELEPHANTS, by Mathias Énard. Translated by Charlotte Mandel. (New Directions, paper, $19.95.) In this intoxicating novel, set in 1506, Michelangelo sets up shop in Constantinople to design a bridge connecting Europe and Asia. SLEEP OF MEMORY, by Patrick Modiano. Translated by Mark Polizzotti. (Yale, $24.) The Nobel laureate's dreamlike novels summon elusive, half-forgotten episodes. Here, that means Paris in the '60s, love affairs, a flirtation with the occult and a shocking crime. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 31, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review

Modiano's first book since winning the Nobel Prize in 2014, a bestseller in France and finely translated here by Mark Polizzotti, is a dream-like detective tale set in Paris. The older narrator tracks his younger self and doesn't try to bridge the gap between who he was and who he has become. The abyss really can't be bridged, after all, and to attempt to do so would be dishonest: The narrator reports on chance encounters, visits old neighborhoods, hangs around places he once had good reason to haunt, and recalls, with some trepidation, his involvement in what may have been a murder. Modiano was born in 1945, the story begins in the 1960s, and its conclusion coincides with the end of the era when people lived in hotels. The young Modiano was, like so many others, always in temporary digs and bent on escape, but whether towards or away from life it is impossible to say. This darkly evocative novel of one man's troubling past brings a line from poet John Ashbery to mind, One whiffs an era's bad breath. --Michael Autrey Copyright 2018 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

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.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A languid, novelistic portrait of the artistwinner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 2014as a young man."Those people you often wonder about, whose disappearance is shrouded in mystery, a mystery you'll never be able to solveyou'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 cafsas I called themwhen any hope seems warranted as long as it was still dark, I would meet up with a certain Genevive Dalame." Genevive 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 caf-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 withwell, 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. Genevive 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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.