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Clouded memories: Ballerina, by Patrick Modiano, reviewed

An ageing narrator looks back 50 years to ‘a most uncertain’ period of his life in Paris and his relationship with a mysterious, elusive ballet dancer

8 March 2025

9:00 AM

8 March 2025

9:00 AM

Ballerina Patrick Modiano, translated by Mark Polizzotti

Yale, pp.122, 14.99

There are, broadly speaking, two types of artist: the explorer and the miner. The explorer keeps moving on, staking out new aesthetic or thematic terrain, while the miner keeps returning, digging deeper into the same earth each time. Patrick Modiano, the French Nobel prizewinner for literature in 2014, is an artist firmly of the second camp.

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