Overall I enjoyed reading most of these essays. The author explores the many stories and mysteries of his family and the effect they have had on his present identity, esp as he becomes a new father. He begins by researching his parents during WWII in Paris and uncovers more questions. The essays jump in time from past and present. It is well written and very easy to read. Enjoy

Beautiful writing style as always with Patrick Modiano's books. But unfortunately, the book just didn't grab my attention as I wanted it to. The author's reflection on past events, this book consists of several shorter passages. Not bad, although. 3.5 stars from me.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read this! All opinions are my own.

Patrick Modiano was born in France in 1945. He is a French novelist and won the Nobel prize in literature in 2014, Most of his novels had not been translated into English before winning the Nobel prize. This is my first time reading his work, translated by Mark Polizzotti.

In Family Record, Modiano weaves together stories of his complicated and mysterious family history. One of the major themes is identity, and the struggle we each face in finding our own. Patrick seems to be Searching for answers about his family's past. Particularly, his father's during the troubled period of the Paris Occupation in WWII. Patrick jumps around from past to present, giving glimpses of his life and the moments that defined him. As well as the mysteries he has yet to figure out. I am left wanting to know more about his Fathers story and I am left with many questions.

This was a very interesting read, I am looking forward to reading more by this Author.

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, Encre sympathique.

Published in 1977, Family Record constitutes a fascinating diptych with the even more overtly autobiographical Pedigree: A Memoir(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 Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas 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.

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’.

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.

I liked it, but some of the essays went way over my head. Also useful to have a street-level knowledge of Paris and in-depth knowledge of the French Occupation to understand some of the references.

"An enthralling reflection on the ways that family history influences identity, from the 2014 Nobel laureate for literature."

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 revie

I highly recommend this book. Both the historical and autobiographical aspects of this story are absolutely fascinating. It is extremely well written as well.

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.

This book is like finding a worn box in an attic full of sepia-toned photos of life gone by. The individual pictures are just snapshots but, taken together, speak volumes of life, history, identity, etc.

Family Record begins with the narrator trying to register his newborn daughter Zenaide with the city. He meets an old friend of his father by chance and asks questions of his father who disappeared when he was a child. but gets little upon his request, other than the knowledge that his parent's marriage was established under false identities. His daughter does get registered - in the nick of time - effectively establishing her identity in the world. So begins the essential theme of the book - identity and history.

The rest of the book carries on in vignettes - about his father, his grandmother, his mother, himself. Some are, perhaps, based in truth and others are clearly based in fantasy, but most are filled with vibrant characters that come off the page through Modiano's sublime descriptive narrative style.

I can't say that the vignette-like style didn't get on my nerves at times it did. My brain wants a linear narrative and had some trouble adapting to this style throughout. But life isn't always so linear (while always being linear, if you know what I mean) so, I stuck it through and it worked for me in the end. Some vignettes were a tad more boring than others. However, Noble prize-winning Modiano is a fantastic writer and it is worth it to take this peek into his creative mind.

Thank you to NetGalley and Yale University Press for an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

Family Record is a interesting literary tale that is creative. The story is well written and the characters are well developed.

Patrick Modiano shares a compelling and artfully woven stream of experiences in Family Record. On the one hand, this book has value as a literary work...on the other, it is a powerful segment of history. Modiano both utilizes and elevates the autobiographical mode.

Highly recommended reading.