A new novel by Patrick Modiano, the 'Proust of our time', that fully captures his original experiences and origins as a writer, as seen for the first time.
Since publishing his first novel, Place de l'Étoile, in 1968, Modiano has published one novel every two years, and has continued to do so consistently even after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Throughout his career, the author's gaze has been directed towards a vague past, and he has built his own world by tracing the true nature of the ghostly beings he encountered during that time.
And in his thirtieth novel, The Road to Memory, Modiano reveals the reason for this directly for the first time.


"The Road to Memory" is not a novel that looks back on the past with nostalgia.
Rather, it is closer to a painful journey back in time, with a desire to understand the past in which one has lived like a sleepwalker.
Immediately after the publication, French media outlets even published reviews saying that Modiano had never before so directly revealed his motivations for writing, and that he might not have any more stories left to tell as a writer.

Chevreuse.
Perhaps this name will attract other names like a magnet.

--- p.14

The ghosts were not afraid to reappear in broad daylight.
Who knows? In the years to come, the ghosts might return to make their presence known, like menacing criminals.
Since no one can live again to correct the past, the best way to render ghosts completely harmless and keep a distance from them would be to turn them into characters in a novel.

--- p.37

Having lived for many years on the narrow line between reality and dreams, accustomed to letting them mirror each other and sometimes even blend together, he followed his own path with unwavering determination.
Because I knew that even the slightest deviation could upset the temporarily found balance.

--- p.55

Time has slowly erased various periods of his life.
No era had any connection with the era that followed.
It was a life of disconnection, avalanches, or even amnesia.

--- p.60

Sometimes one detail brings out other details.
It clings to the first detail, as if the ocean current brings a pile of decaying aquatic plants.
Then the terrain awakens memories that are further away.

--- p.63

All indicators were erased over time.
These two events, which came to mind after a long time, seemed to have happened simultaneously, and were mixed together, as if the two photographs had been mixed together in the process of printing them simultaneously.

--- p.85

Who wrote this?
'We come from childhood, as if from some country.' But we had to be more precise about which childhood and which country.
That must have been difficult for him.
And that afternoon he had neither the courage nor the desire to do so.

--- p.102

He stole their lives, even their names, and their lives will now exist only between the pages of a book.
In reality, you will never have the chance to meet them on the streets of Paris.
And then summer came.
It was a summer he had never experienced before, a summer so transparent and intense that the ghosts eventually disappeared.

--- p.175

As he continued down the road, he felt as if time had not stopped, but rather that he had simply returned to the middle of an afternoon in the endless summer of his childhood.
Back to my childhood, when time wasn't frozen, but just still, and I spent hours watching ants scurrying around the edge of a well.

--- p.191

He looked out the roof window.
The branches of the poplar tree tops rustled gently.
The tree gave him a signal.
A plane moved slowly across the blue sky, leaving a white streak behind its tail.
But it was unclear whether the plane was lost, came from the past, or went back to the past.

--- p.192