Ballerina

A critically acclaimed #1 bestseller in France—a novel of art, desire, and time lost and regained, from Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano

"Pithy and introspective. . . . Modiano delivers wondrous images of the tricks memory plays, sharply translated by Polizzotti. . . . Readers will savor this wistful narrative."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Paris, 1960s. A young dancer and single mother, who might or might not be the narrator's love interest, is revisited by menacing figures from her past, even as she tries to escape that past through her art. Set in the shimmering world of the Paris ballet, a world populated by giants such as Balanchine and Nureyev, Ballerina revisits the themes of memory, desire, and ineffable danger that have become hallmarks of Patrick Modiano's fiction.

Focusing on the dancer's troubled relations with her young son, her enigmatic involvement with the narrator, her mysterious past entanglements, and the tension between the narrator's past and present selves, Modiano's new novel is both a nostalgic evocation of the world gone by and a haunting exploration of time lost and regained.

In deceptively weightless prose, deftly translated by Mark Polizzotti, Patrick Modiano interrogates the clash of current and vanished realities, the paradox of growing older, and the spectral persistence of love.

“Modiano has such a deft way of describing a place or setting a scene that his words conjure up the promise of hidden worlds.”—Tobias Grey, Financial Times

“A nimble translation by Mark Polizzotti. . . . Modiano masters the familiar tropes of the roman noir to build intrigue and suspense, before subverting the genre’s conventions.”—Marcus Hijkoop, The Telegraph

“Modiano is one of France’s greatest living writers. . . . He imbues his taut, slim novels with the thrill of chasing a mystery.”—Jeanne Bonner, Boston Globe

“Ballerina is structured like memory itself, and feels true to life. . . . [A] beautiful work of serendipity.”—Frank Lawton, The Spectator

“[A] slim, melancholic, and soaring novel.”—Judith von Sternburg, Frankfurter Rundschau

Praise for the French Edition:
 
“The most ethereal, slender, and crystal-clear of Patrick Modiano’s beautiful novels.”—Jérôme Garcin, L’Obs
 
“In this novel full of delicate melancholy, dance and writing finally become one.”—Fabienne Lemahieu, La Croix
 
“The memories are hazy and the charm works. Irresistibly. We would like to wander the streets of Paris endlessly with Patrick Modiano.”—Marianne Payot, L’Express
 
“A superb novel. . . . Through the repetition of a sound, a light, the name of a character or a street, Patrick Modiano plunges us into a waking dream-state. He invites us, without saying it, to an adventure akin to mysticism. The past no longer exists: everything, under his pen, becomes ‘eternal present.’”—Julien Burri, Le Temps
 
“A book by Modiano . . . you read it in a kind of incandescence. It’s an event. And then, it vanishes: like a mirage. It eludes explanation, description, it’s just something you feel. It’s pure sensibility. Like music. It’s hard to talk about music. We stammer. . . . He is not the author of the past. He is the author of the eternal present that we feel within us.”—Christine Angot, France Inter

Patrick Modiano, winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born in Boulogne-Billancourt, France, in 1945, and published his first novel, La Place de l’Etoile, in 1968. His previous books include Invisible Ink, Sleep of Memory, and Family Record. He lives in Paris. Mark Polizzotti has translated more than sixty books from the French. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

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