A family tree
A family tree (original title: Un pedigree ) is an autobiographical book by the French writer Patrick Modiano . It was published by Éditions Gallimard in 2005 . The German translation by Elisabeth Edl was published two years later by Carl Hanser Verlag .
content
Patrick Modiano describes his childhood and youth from 1945 to 1968. His parents divorced early and live with various new lovers and lovers. Both have a distant relationship with their son. The mother, a cool actress, is mostly absent. The father, a windy businessman with big plans and little success, tries again and again to deport the boy. This grows up in changing boarding schools. Modiano names numerous names of places, mainly in Paris , and people who temporarily play a role in his life or the life of his parents and disappear again as suddenly as they appeared. Many well-known personalities also cross Modiano's life path or, more often, only that of acquaintances. Modiano writes: “May you look over me for all these names and others that will follow. I am a dog who pretends to have a pedigree. "
When Modiano was eleven years old, his brother Rudy, two years his junior, died. According to Modiano, it is the only incident in the book that really concerns him. He explains: "I am writing these pages the way you write a protocol or a résumé, for documentary reasons and probably also to draw a line under a life that was not mine." The motive of the wrong life runs through them Author's youth. It is a life that passes him by without a trace and that he lives through as if he were a stranger in it. He eventually breaks up with his father when he urges him to join the army and has not had any contact with him since. The young Modiano found his calling in literature. Countless books, from trivial to high-level literature, accompany him through his youth. The book ends with the publication of his first novel, La Place de l'Etoile, in 1968.
background
The title Un pedigree is an allusion to the pedigree of a pedigree dog , the listing of ancestors over generations. But it is also a homage to the autobiographical novel Pedigree ( family tree ) by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon , which Modiano admires very much. In addition to his physiological descent, Modiano also places himself in a literary tradition with this title.
Assessments
According to the translator Elisabeth Edl, Un pedigree is a “family tree of life and work history” of the author Modiano, in which numerous motifs and themes, but also concrete figures and entire scenes from his works can be found. For example, the novel, Accident in the Night , the story of a young man's self-discovery, which immediately preceded the book , contained many scenes that, as Un pedigree shows, were taken directly from Modiano's biography. Modiano thus confirms a statement from his second novel La Ronde de nuit : “I don't invent anything. All of the people I speak of have lived. I even push the accuracy so far as to call it by its real name. ”Nonetheless, Un pedigree is neither a classic autobiography nor a key novel . Rather, it is a " development novel by a later famous writer" with the " puzzle between fiction and biography" so typical of Modiano's work .
Florian Welle says in the Süddeutsche Zeitung , Modiano series in A Family Tree, dates, places and names in the hope of each other, through their factuality the reality can be grasped and understood. Welle sees a paradox in the fact that Modiano's sentences are on the one hand of protocol rigor and coolness, mostly in the present tense, which he interprets as Modiano's attempt to visualize the past, but on the other hand, Modiano's poetology is best viewed with vertigo. Let feelings rewrite: “Because the books are not quite as matter-of-fact as is repeatedly claimed - not least by the author himself," sums up Welle.
expenditure
- Un pedigree . Editions Gallimard, Paris 2005, ISBN 2-07-077333-7 .
- A family tree . Translated from the French by Elisabeth Edl . Hanser, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-446-20922-0 ; dtv, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-423-14435-3 .
- A family tree . Read by Gert Heidenreich . Audiobook Hamburg, Hamburg 2015, ISBN 978-3-89903-941-2 .
Web links
Review notes for a family tree at perlentaucher.de
Individual evidence
- ↑ Patrick Modiano: A family tree. Hanser, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-446-20922-0 , p. 9.
- ↑ Patrick Modiano: A family tree. Hanser, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-446-20922-0 , pp. 38-39.
- ↑ Denis Cosnard: Dans la peau de Patrick Modiano. Fayard, Paris 2011, ISBN 978-2-213-66434-7 , chapter 30, no page number.
- ^ Elisabeth Edl: Post Comment. In: Patrick Modiano: A family tree. Hanser, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-446-20922-0 , pp. 117–121, quotation p. 118.
- ↑ Florian Welle: "I was put to sea". Gert Heidenreich reads “A Family Tree” . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , literature supplement, March 10, 2015.