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3.61 AVERAGE
3.61 AVERAGE
This isn't the typical Modiano novel. While the book contains many of the typical themes (occupation, memory, nostalgia), the novel isn't told in a linear manner. Instead, the book consists of fifteen chapters, each a separate memory or story. The stories are related, but they don't interweave. A good book but far from Modiano's best work.
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Ce livre n'est pas le livre typique de Patrick Modiano. On y retrouve beaucoup des thèmes typiques de l'œuvre de Modiano (l'occupation, la mémoire, la nostalgie), mais à la différence que ce roman n'est pas construit de manière linéaire. Livret de Famille est composé de quinze chapitres et chaque chapitre raconte une histoire. Ces histoires sont enchevêtrées. J'ai apprécié ce roman, mais il est loin d'être le meilleur livre de l'auteur.
____________________________________
Ce livre n'est pas le livre typique de Patrick Modiano. On y retrouve beaucoup des thèmes typiques de l'œuvre de Modiano (l'occupation, la mémoire, la nostalgie), mais à la différence que ce roman n'est pas construit de manière linéaire. Livret de Famille est composé de quinze chapitres et chaque chapitre raconte une histoire. Ces histoires sont enchevêtrées. J'ai apprécié ce roman, mais il est loin d'être le meilleur livre de l'auteur.
reflective
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
My childhood was impacted by a move to another state, leaving behind my family, friends, and school. I was not the same child afterward. I did not live in the present for a long time. Memories of the past were held dear; I was awash in nostalgia and longing to restore what I had lost consumed me.
My grandfather wrote about his childhood in the early 1900s and I inherited his family genealogy records. Decades later I became a genealogy researcher. My father wrote his memoirs of growing up in the Depression and WWII years and running a business in the 1950s. Perhaps it was already in my blood to look back and record life. A few years back I wrote about my life on my blog, dipping into my diaries and scrapbooks to rediscover what I had forgotten.
Or misremembered. Somehow, our memories are not truly all fact, there is an element of fiction, rewriting, that happens in our brains. We naturally turn our experience into a novel, a story with meaning, a vehicle used to demonstrate the truth as we would have it.
"Memory itself is corroded by acid, and of all those cries of suffering and horrified faces from the past, only echoes remain, growing fainter and fainter vague outlines." ~from Family Record by Patrick Modiano
French Literature is my weak spot and I had not heard of Pulitzer Prizer winner Patrick Modiano. The cover and book title, Family Record, caught my eye and the blurb cinched my interest in requesting the galley.
Modiano shares his family and personal history through what are essentially short stories, glimpses that skip across time, weaving together a thoughtful consideration of experience.
He tells about returning to the places of his childhood and youth and encountering people who knew his family. He records meetings with strangers with mysterious pasts. And of the beautiful woman who pretended to be the daughter of a once-famous entertainer and who asked him to write his biography, setting Modiano on a career path.
He recreates the romantic meeting of his parents in occupied Paris and recalls the uncle who longed to live in the country in an old mill. He tells the story of losing himself to the present in Switzerland at twenty years old and seeing the man who collaborated with the Nazis to deport thousands from France, deciding to confront him.
"...And in Paris, the survivors of the camps waited in striped pajamas, beneath the chandeliers of the Hotel Lutetia. I remember all of it."~ from Family Record by Patrick Modiano
He begins with the birth of his daughter and the rush to obtain her birth registration and he ends with his daughter in his arms, a being yet without memory.
It is a lovely read, quiet and thoughtful.
The publisher granted me access to a free egalley through NetGalley in exchange for my fair and unbiased review.
My grandfather wrote about his childhood in the early 1900s and I inherited his family genealogy records. Decades later I became a genealogy researcher. My father wrote his memoirs of growing up in the Depression and WWII years and running a business in the 1950s. Perhaps it was already in my blood to look back and record life. A few years back I wrote about my life on my blog, dipping into my diaries and scrapbooks to rediscover what I had forgotten.
Or misremembered. Somehow, our memories are not truly all fact, there is an element of fiction, rewriting, that happens in our brains. We naturally turn our experience into a novel, a story with meaning, a vehicle used to demonstrate the truth as we would have it.
"Memory itself is corroded by acid, and of all those cries of suffering and horrified faces from the past, only echoes remain, growing fainter and fainter vague outlines." ~from Family Record by Patrick Modiano
French Literature is my weak spot and I had not heard of Pulitzer Prizer winner Patrick Modiano. The cover and book title, Family Record, caught my eye and the blurb cinched my interest in requesting the galley.
Modiano shares his family and personal history through what are essentially short stories, glimpses that skip across time, weaving together a thoughtful consideration of experience.
He tells about returning to the places of his childhood and youth and encountering people who knew his family. He records meetings with strangers with mysterious pasts. And of the beautiful woman who pretended to be the daughter of a once-famous entertainer and who asked him to write his biography, setting Modiano on a career path.
He recreates the romantic meeting of his parents in occupied Paris and recalls the uncle who longed to live in the country in an old mill. He tells the story of losing himself to the present in Switzerland at twenty years old and seeing the man who collaborated with the Nazis to deport thousands from France, deciding to confront him.
"...And in Paris, the survivors of the camps waited in striped pajamas, beneath the chandeliers of the Hotel Lutetia. I remember all of it."~ from Family Record by Patrick Modiano
He begins with the birth of his daughter and the rush to obtain her birth registration and he ends with his daughter in his arms, a being yet without memory.
It is a lovely read, quiet and thoughtful.
The publisher granted me access to a free egalley through NetGalley in exchange for my fair and unbiased review.
Patrick Modiano is not a reliable narrator. This is a collection of autobiographical vignettes which are not necessarily literally true. Although Modiano is very well known (Goncourt, Nobel), I haven't read any of his other work; one reviewer here says this isn't the best place to start and I can believe that. Modiano has a lot of backstory and it probably helps if you're aware of that before the start. I remember seeing him interviewed by Bernard Pivot on Bouillon de Culture and he came across as a slightly odd and introverted person.
The title Livret de Famille evokes the theme well; Modiano explores family, identity and memory through these different episodes. Some of these "memories" are of his parents before he was born; others are perhaps based on real incidents but include a large dose of fantasy (notably the episode at the country estate).
I found it a bit uneven. Some chapters really engaged me; I particularly liked the opening one where he registers his newborn daughter's birth and by chance meets an old friend of his father, the one set in Switzerland, and the penultimate one where he visits the flat overlooking the Seine where he grew up. Others left me indifferent. Probably best read in short bursts, a chapter at a time.
The title Livret de Famille evokes the theme well; Modiano explores family, identity and memory through these different episodes. Some of these "memories" are of his parents before he was born; others are perhaps based on real incidents but include a large dose of fantasy (notably the episode at the country estate).
I found it a bit uneven. Some chapters really engaged me; I particularly liked the opening one where he registers his newborn daughter's birth and by chance meets an old friend of his father, the one set in Switzerland, and the penultimate one where he visits the flat overlooking the Seine where he grew up. Others left me indifferent. Probably best read in short bursts, a chapter at a time.
Abating shadows
For Patrick Modiano’s bevy of loyal readers, October 2019 appears glowing with promise: Family record, the English translation of his 1977 semi-autobiographical novel Livret de famille is coming up, and maybe even more thrilling, a new novel will see the light of day, [b:Encre sympathique|48156907|Encre sympathique|Patrick Modiano|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1568542172l/48156907._SX50_.jpg|73381124].
Published in 1977, Family Record constitutes a fascinating diptych with the even more overtly autobiographical [b:Pedigree: A Memoir|25074755|Pedigree A Memoir|Patrick Modiano|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1427161576l/25074755._SY75_.jpg|1981188](2005), a detachedly told account of the first twenty years of his life, characterised by parental neglect and abandonment.
I sat at the desk. I felt an emptiness that I had known since childhood, from the moment I’d understood that people and things will leave you someday, will disappear.
These lines seem to crystallize the essence of Patrick Modiano’s writing, shaping the mental substance and tincture from which he spins all his novels. A analogous observation expressing that fundamental aching I encountered in [b:Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas|22859597|Suspended Sentences Three Novellas|Patrick Modiano|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1413043986l/22859597._SY75_.jpg|42427494] this summer, in which the narrator observes 'I had taken on this job because I refused to accept that people and things could disappear without a trace. How could anyone resign himself to that?'
The sense of anxiety and hurt brooding under these words which is connected to the transitory presence of people in his life sheds a light on the motives why Patrick Modiano and many of his alter ego protagonists turn into unwilling as well as relentless detectives of the often murky and distressing past - clarifying why Patrick Modiano and his characters seem forever chasing ghosts, forever gauging their roots, too: 'I convinced myself that it was where I would find my roots, my home, my native soil, everything I didn’t have'.
Composed out of fifteen short vignettes moving backwards and forwards in time, a recollection of memories from various periods is set in motion the moment the narrator is about to register his new-born daughter. Meeting an old friend from his father, requiring his livret de famille (a civil document, in which marriages, death, and children born are registered), he is reminded of the unsteadiness and unreliability of his own civil status, as the ‘livret’ reveals his parents were married during the second world war under false identities. This spurs him to construct a more appropriate ‘family record’ out of flashes he remembers on his parents, his Flemish mother, a young actress from Antwerp ending up in Paris; an uncle; a notorious French collaborator who fled to Switzerland after the war; his father ever entangled in shady business affairs; the apartment on the Quai de Conti where he lived as a child; a first love who kindles him into writing. Information on his parents, who mostly left Modiano and his brother to their own devices, dumping their children with vague acquaintances, is scarce and can only be retrieved obliquely:
I thought about my parents. I was certain that, if I wanted to meet witnesses and friends from their youth, it would always be in places like this: disused hotel lobbies in far-off countries, over which floated a scent of exile, harbouring creatures who had never had a home base or defined civil status.
What is fictional and what autobiographical is as per usual hard to distinguish, when the narrator speaks of himself as Patrick or mentions the name of his brother Rudy (who died when Modiano was twelve), some of these vignettes seem more directly autobiographical while others are more muddled. People who cross the narrator’s path are vaporous and enigmatic, like the blonde Geneviève Catelain; some scenes have a Proustian ambiance (membership of the Jockey club is mentioned when the young narrator joins his father to stay in a duke’s chateau for a hunting party); places (Paris, but also Nice and Biarritz, Rome, Tunisia) are foggy and enveloped in a ‘blanket of silence’.
Readers who have encountered Modiano before will definitely recognize familiar themes and ingredients like the boarding school in Switzerland, the French Gestapo headquarters, the shady role and dubious affairs of Alberto Modiano, Modiano’s Jewish father, during the war, people disappearing in vague circumstances, memory and forgetting, the attempts to recapture the ever hazier contours of a bygone era by stirring up the past.
(Henri Cartier-Bresson, Brasserie Lipp)
Would I recommend reading this book? Having read ten of Modiano’s books now, ‘Family record’ to me ranks among his most melancholic and beautiful novels. Some sentences cut right through me:
I was happy. I had no more memory. My amnesia would thicken with each passing day, like a callus. No more past. No more future. Time would halt and everything would blend into the blue mist of Lake Geneva. I had reached the state I called ‘Switzerland of the heart’.
And
Memory itself is corroded by acid, and of all those cries of suffering and horrified faces from the past, only echoes remain, growing fainter and fainter, vague outlines. Switzerland of the heart.
(Patrick Modiano by Olivier Roller)
It is that shattering friction, the discord between Modiano’s search for identity and his longing for oblivion that make some of his novels so haunting and in a sense boundlessly sad, leaving an imprint of forlornness that seems to grow deeper by every next novel I read by him.
Many thanks to NetGalley, Yale University Press and the author for giving me the chance to read an advanced copy of Family Record.
For Patrick Modiano’s bevy of loyal readers, October 2019 appears glowing with promise: Family record, the English translation of his 1977 semi-autobiographical novel Livret de famille is coming up, and maybe even more thrilling, a new novel will see the light of day, [b:Encre sympathique|48156907|Encre sympathique|Patrick Modiano|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1568542172l/48156907._SX50_.jpg|73381124].
Published in 1977, Family Record constitutes a fascinating diptych with the even more overtly autobiographical [b:Pedigree: A Memoir|25074755|Pedigree A Memoir|Patrick Modiano|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1427161576l/25074755._SY75_.jpg|1981188](2005), a detachedly told account of the first twenty years of his life, characterised by parental neglect and abandonment.
I sat at the desk. I felt an emptiness that I had known since childhood, from the moment I’d understood that people and things will leave you someday, will disappear.
These lines seem to crystallize the essence of Patrick Modiano’s writing, shaping the mental substance and tincture from which he spins all his novels. A analogous observation expressing that fundamental aching I encountered in [b:Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas|22859597|Suspended Sentences Three Novellas|Patrick Modiano|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1413043986l/22859597._SY75_.jpg|42427494] this summer, in which the narrator observes 'I had taken on this job because I refused to accept that people and things could disappear without a trace. How could anyone resign himself to that?'
The sense of anxiety and hurt brooding under these words which is connected to the transitory presence of people in his life sheds a light on the motives why Patrick Modiano and many of his alter ego protagonists turn into unwilling as well as relentless detectives of the often murky and distressing past - clarifying why Patrick Modiano and his characters seem forever chasing ghosts, forever gauging their roots, too: 'I convinced myself that it was where I would find my roots, my home, my native soil, everything I didn’t have'.
Composed out of fifteen short vignettes moving backwards and forwards in time, a recollection of memories from various periods is set in motion the moment the narrator is about to register his new-born daughter. Meeting an old friend from his father, requiring his livret de famille (a civil document, in which marriages, death, and children born are registered), he is reminded of the unsteadiness and unreliability of his own civil status, as the ‘livret’ reveals his parents were married during the second world war under false identities. This spurs him to construct a more appropriate ‘family record’ out of flashes he remembers on his parents, his Flemish mother, a young actress from Antwerp ending up in Paris; an uncle; a notorious French collaborator who fled to Switzerland after the war; his father ever entangled in shady business affairs; the apartment on the Quai de Conti where he lived as a child; a first love who kindles him into writing. Information on his parents, who mostly left Modiano and his brother to their own devices, dumping their children with vague acquaintances, is scarce and can only be retrieved obliquely:
I thought about my parents. I was certain that, if I wanted to meet witnesses and friends from their youth, it would always be in places like this: disused hotel lobbies in far-off countries, over which floated a scent of exile, harbouring creatures who had never had a home base or defined civil status.
What is fictional and what autobiographical is as per usual hard to distinguish, when the narrator speaks of himself as Patrick or mentions the name of his brother Rudy (who died when Modiano was twelve), some of these vignettes seem more directly autobiographical while others are more muddled. People who cross the narrator’s path are vaporous and enigmatic, like the blonde Geneviève Catelain; some scenes have a Proustian ambiance (membership of the Jockey club is mentioned when the young narrator joins his father to stay in a duke’s chateau for a hunting party); places (Paris, but also Nice and Biarritz, Rome, Tunisia) are foggy and enveloped in a ‘blanket of silence’.
Readers who have encountered Modiano before will definitely recognize familiar themes and ingredients like the boarding school in Switzerland, the French Gestapo headquarters, the shady role and dubious affairs of Alberto Modiano, Modiano’s Jewish father, during the war, people disappearing in vague circumstances, memory and forgetting, the attempts to recapture the ever hazier contours of a bygone era by stirring up the past.
(Henri Cartier-Bresson, Brasserie Lipp)
Would I recommend reading this book? Having read ten of Modiano’s books now, ‘Family record’ to me ranks among his most melancholic and beautiful novels. Some sentences cut right through me:
I was happy. I had no more memory. My amnesia would thicken with each passing day, like a callus. No more past. No more future. Time would halt and everything would blend into the blue mist of Lake Geneva. I had reached the state I called ‘Switzerland of the heart’.
And
Memory itself is corroded by acid, and of all those cries of suffering and horrified faces from the past, only echoes remain, growing fainter and fainter, vague outlines. Switzerland of the heart.
(Patrick Modiano by Olivier Roller)
It is that shattering friction, the discord between Modiano’s search for identity and his longing for oblivion that make some of his novels so haunting and in a sense boundlessly sad, leaving an imprint of forlornness that seems to grow deeper by every next novel I read by him.
Many thanks to NetGalley, Yale University Press and the author for giving me the chance to read an advanced copy of Family Record.
4.5
I tried to fight the heaviness that pulled me backward, and dreamed of liberating myself from my poisoned memory. I would have given anything to be an amnesiac.
This autobiographical novel consists of fifteen interrelated chapters in which Modiano, expertly and with a few brushstrokes, paints his memories of the past and offers us a glimpse of the days gone by, the places long vanished and the people long deceased.
Memory itself is corroded by acid, and of all those cries of suffering and horrified faces from the past, only echoes remain, growing fainter and fainter, vague outlines.
I tried to fight the heaviness that pulled me backward, and dreamed of liberating myself from my poisoned memory. I would have given anything to be an amnesiac.
This autobiographical novel consists of fifteen interrelated chapters in which Modiano, expertly and with a few brushstrokes, paints his memories of the past and offers us a glimpse of the days gone by, the places long vanished and the people long deceased.
Memory itself is corroded by acid, and of all those cries of suffering and horrified faces from the past, only echoes remain, growing fainter and fainter, vague outlines.
I found this book to be pretty boring. It was a sort of memoir but more like vignettes from his life and there were a few stories that caught my attention more than others, but overall I found myself to be uninterested in a lot of the stories. It had a very Proust-like feel to it with an emphasis on memories and different objects/people reminding Modiano of the past, but I was not a huge fan.
If I am not mistaken, this is the English translation of the French original “Livret de familie”. It is an excellent book and the translator did a great job at keeping Modiano’s style intact.
I really liked this book but at the same time I am confounded by it all….