Book review: Pedigree

LAST October, the Swedish Academy stunned the world of letters with its announcement that France’s Patrick Modiano had been awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Though not an entirely obscure choice — over a four-decade career, he’d already won most of France’s highest honours, including, in 1978, the Prix Goncour — the fact that so little of his output was available in English meant that few had considered him a serious candidate.

According to the academy’s spokesman, Peter Englund, they had chosen to celebrate the author’s remarkable “art of memory” and acclaimed him as “a Marcel Proust of our time”. Pedigree makes sense of, and at the same time challenges, such statements.