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 fifty books from the French. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.
“Scene of the Crime, evocatively translated by Mark Polizzotti, unravels in a bygone Paris enveloped in a fog of déjà vu and vertigo. . . . Modiano, whose writing is heightened by elisions and silent pauses, is a master at creating mood. His Paris is aglow with noirish menace, a perfect palimpsest for [narrator] Bosmans’s memories.”—Anderson Tepper, New York Times Book Review “Elegiac, bittersweet, ghostly, Modiano’s books are like black-and-white photographs from another century, suggestive of all that’s been lost and the vague traces that remain. . . . Scene of the Crime [is] gracefully translated by Mark Polizzotti. . . . Modiano’s prose is hypnotic, pregnant with mystery, full of dialogue that contains more than it shows.”—Frank Lawton, Telegraph