Pedigree (10 page)

That evening, I felt unburdened for the first time in my life. The threat that had weighed on me for so many years, kept me on edge, had dissolved in the Paris air. I had set sail before the worm-eaten wharf could collapse. It was time.

P
ATRICK
M
ODIANO
, winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born in Boulogne-Billancourt, France, in 1945, and was educated in Annecy and Paris. He published his first novel,
La Place de l'Etoile
, in 1968. In 1978, he was awarded the Prix Goncourt for
Rue des Boutiques Obscures
(published in English as
Missing Person
), and in 1996 he received the Grand Prix National des Lettres for his body of work. Modiano's other writings include a book-length interview with the writer Emmanuel Berl and, with Louis Malle, the screenplay for
Lacombe Lucien.

M
ARK
P
OLIZZOTTI'S
books include the collaborative novel
S.
(1991),
Lautréamont Nomad
(1994),
Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995; rev. ed., 2009),
Luis Buñuel's Los Olvidados
(British Film Institute, 2006), and
Bob Dylan: Highway 61 Revisited
(Continuum, 2006). His articles and reviews have appeared in the
New Republic
, the
Wall Street Journal, ARTnews
, the
Nation, Parnassus, Partisan Review, Bookforum
, and elsewhere. The translator of more than forty books from the French, including works by Patrick Modiano, Gustave Flaubert, Marguerite Duras, André Breton, Raymond Roussel, and Jean Echenoz, he directs the publications program at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.