Modiano's "Pedigree: A Memoir"
Contemporary Proust? Who knows. Post-Nobel, more and more of Modiano is coming out. Someone's making $$$. Lots on Kindle now. When I first read him (a year or so ago), there was hardly anything. * From Pedigree : Over the following months, my father had to resign himself to my finally leaving the dormitories where I'd lived since age eleven. He made appointments to see me in cafes. And he trotted out his standard grievances against my mother and against me. I could never establish a bond between us. At each meeting, I was reduced to begging him for a fifty-franc bill, which he would give me very grudgingly and which I'd bring home to my mother. On certain days, I brought nothing home, which provoked furious outbursts from her. Soon -- around the time I turned eighteen and in the years following -- I started to find her, on my own, some of those miserable fifty-franc bills bearing the likeness of Jean Racine. But nothing softened the coldness and hostility ...
