Patrick Modiano’s Pedigree. (Translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti, Maclehose Press) is a memoir in 100-odd pages.

The writer was born in 1945 to a Jewish man and Flemish woman who meet in Paris under the Occupation. Modiano describes his mother, an actress, as a “pretty girl with an arid heart.” (“I can’t recall a single act of genuine warmth or protectiveness from her”) His father, a shady businessman, who never took his baccalaureate exam, was, as a teenager and young adult “left to his own devices.”

“He was searching for El Dorado, in vain.”

As for himself, Modiano writes: “I’m a dog who pretends to have a pedigree.”

Putting in few words the death of his brother, Modiano writes that apart from his brother Rudy’s death, he do not believe that anything he relates in the memoir (an autobiographical portrait of both post-war Paris and a tumultuous childhood) truly matters to him. 

“I am writing this pages the way one compile a report or a resume, as documentation and to have done with a life that was not my own…”

Brief and to the point, grim but intense, Pedigree is typical Modiano. Not for readers who look in books entertainment value.