Sleep of Memory

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.

“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

"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


Praise for the French edition of Sleep of Memory:

“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)
 
“A splendid, wistful book.”—Olivia de Lamberterie, Elle
 
“A beautiful narrative, mysteriously haunted and poignant.”—Jérôme Garcin, Le Nouvel Observateur