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Dora Bruder (1997)

by Patrick Modiano

Other authors: See the other authors section.

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7963527,597 (3.72)62
2014 Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature Patrick Modiano opens Dora Bruder by telling how in 1988 he stumbled across an ad in the personal columns of the New Year's Eve 1941 edition of Paris Soir. Placed by the parents of a 15-year-old Jewish girl, Dora Bruder, who had run away from her Catholic boarding school, the ad sets Modiano off on a quest to find out everything he can about Dora and why, at the height of German reprisals, she ran away on a bitterly cold day from the people hiding her. He finds only one other official mention of her name on a list of Jews deported from Paris to Auschwitz in September 1942. With no knowledge of Dora Bruder aside from these two records, Modiano continues to dig for fragments from Dora's past. What little he discovers in official records and through remaining family members, becomes a meditation on the immense losses of the peroid-lost people, lost stories, and lost history. Modiano delivers a moving account of the ten-year investigation that took him back to the sights and sounds of Paris under the Nazi Occupation and the paranoia of the Pétain regime as he tries to find connections to Dora. In his efforts to exhume her from the past, Modiano realizes that he must come to terms with the specters of his own troubled adolescence. The result, a montage of creative and historical material, is Modiano's personal rumination on loss, both memoir and memorial.… (more)
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English (22)  Italian (7)  French (3)  Hungarian (1)  Dutch (1)  Spanish (1)  All languages (35)
Showing 1-5 of 22 (next | show all)
Five years after publishing [Dora Bruder], Patrick Modiano won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He is renowned for his atmospheric writing, especially of the streets and neighborhoods of Paris, and for exploring issues related to WWII and the German occupation of France. His writing often blends memoir, archival material, and fiction. [Dora Bruder] is an exemplar of all that makes Modiano distinctive.

In 1988 Modiano read a small missing persons ad in a 1941 Paris newspaper and became obsessed with finding out what happened to the girl. Dora Bruder was fifteen years old when she ran away from her Catholic boarding school. Her parents placed the ad after going to the police, a dangerous thing to do in 1941 Paris when you are Jewish and non-French. Piecing together the fragments of her story from police reports, maps, old photographs, and the dossiers kept on Jews, Modiano recreates a time and place that is both specific and universal. Interwoven with her story is his own. He grew up walking the same streets she did, he too was taken to the police station in a Black Maria, and his father was nearly deported for not wearing the mandated Star of David in 1942, the same year Dora′s father was. The result is a metafiction where the author is as much a part of the story as the protagonist.

I find the experience of reading Modiano to be like reading with cotton balls in your head. Everything is slightly blurry with a muffled quality that makes me want to whisper. It′s a singular experience that leaves me unsure as to whether I liked the book or if that′s even the point. Others are much less vague in their reviews, and I would invite you to read Basswood′s for a much more eloquent one. ( )
  labfs39 | Apr 26, 2021 |
A brilliant book that can be read time and again, especially in this Vintage Editions format. It looks and feels like a proper French book. I do hope more Modiano translations are issued in this format. In this sad story, Modiano, referring to a book by Fredo Lampe, summarises his own style of writing perfectly, page 82, 'Of short scenes unfolding as in a film, interlocking people's lives. The whole thing light and fluid, linked together very loosely, pictorial, lyric, full of atmosphere'. ( )
  jon1lambert | Oct 7, 2020 |
Más bien un 3.5.
Modiano escribe muy sólido, muy bien. Me gusta la estructura de la novela; párrafos cortos, concisos, el narrador se confunde con el autor, Dora se confunde con Patrick.
Su estilo es tan personal como sentimentalista, a veces peca de caer en lugares comunes, de dejarse llevar demasiado por la nostalgia y el dolor del París ocupado. Pero eso, ya que uno se acostumbra, añade verosimilitud a la obra, da la impresión de ser más una crónica que una novela, de ser el narrador más persona que personaje. Conforme el texto avanza se desdibujan las fronteras entre novela y verdad, entre vida y ficción. París como país, como mundo independiente en el que todo sucede al mismo tiempo, en el que Bruder y Modiano terminan siendo sin querer la misma persona. ( )
  LeoOrozco | Feb 26, 2019 |
3.5 stars, GR does not have a half star option.

I did like it, but it was too thread bare for me. What he found out about this young lady is next to nothing and I was thinking he turned Paris upside down interviewing every gov't worker and investigation every office to put together a very complex 'who done it ' or jigsaw puzzle. It was not that way, what he was able to uncover ( whether because truly there was nothing else to find or lack of skill on his part, I don't know ) was next to nothing, so you really know so little about Dora by the book's end.

I had hoped for much more. ( )
  REINADECOPIAYPEGA | Jan 11, 2018 |
Modiano’s favorite themes are the past, disappearance, searching for answers. They are all here. In Dora Bruder he researches the mystery of a Jewish girl who disappeared in Paris in 1941, a victim of the holocaust. While knowing what likely happened to her, he searches for traces of how it happened, why, always this question lingering in the background: “Why, I wonder, does the lightning strike in one place rather than another.”

No detail is too small in his search. Modiano mourns that fact that an office number is obscured in a photo. “We shall never know the number of this door.” And the sense of loss permeates the book. “So many friends whom I never knew disappeared in 1945, the year I was born.” ( )
  Hagelstein | Sep 30, 2017 |
Showing 1-5 of 22 (next | show all)
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» Add other authors (15 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Patrick Modianoprimary authorall editionscalculated
Bruno, FrancescoTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Edl, ElisabethTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Kilmartin, JoannaTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
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Eight years ago, in an old copy of Paris-Soir dated 31 December 1941, a heading on page 3 caught my eye: “From Day to Day.”
Quotations
In writing this book, I send out signals, like a lighthouse beacon in whose power to illuminate the darkness, alas, I have no faith. But I live in hope.
It took me four years to discover her exact date of birth: 25 February 1926. and a further two years to find out her place of birth: Paris 12th arrondissement. But I am a patient man. I can wait for hours in the rain.
I think of Dora Bruder. I remind myself that, for her, running away was not as easy as it was for me, twenty years later, in a world that had once again been rendered harmless. To her, everything in that city of December 1941, its curfews, its soldiers, its police, was hostile, intent on her destruction. At nearly sixteen years old, without knowing why, she had the entire world against her.
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2014 Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature Patrick Modiano opens Dora Bruder by telling how in 1988 he stumbled across an ad in the personal columns of the New Year's Eve 1941 edition of Paris Soir. Placed by the parents of a 15-year-old Jewish girl, Dora Bruder, who had run away from her Catholic boarding school, the ad sets Modiano off on a quest to find out everything he can about Dora and why, at the height of German reprisals, she ran away on a bitterly cold day from the people hiding her. He finds only one other official mention of her name on a list of Jews deported from Paris to Auschwitz in September 1942. With no knowledge of Dora Bruder aside from these two records, Modiano continues to dig for fragments from Dora's past. What little he discovers in official records and through remaining family members, becomes a meditation on the immense losses of the peroid-lost people, lost stories, and lost history. Modiano delivers a moving account of the ten-year investigation that took him back to the sights and sounds of Paris under the Nazi Occupation and the paranoia of the Pétain regime as he tries to find connections to Dora. In his efforts to exhume her from the past, Modiano realizes that he must come to terms with the specters of his own troubled adolescence. The result, a montage of creative and historical material, is Modiano's personal rumination on loss, both memoir and memorial.

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