Narrative
The Search Warrant
Dora Bruder
Patrick Modiano · 1997
Synopsis
A writer reads in an old issue of Paris-Soir, dated 31 December 1941, a missing-person notice: a couple is looking for their daughter, Dora Bruder, fifteen years old, whose height, face, clothes and address, 41 boulevard Ornano, they give. The writer sets out in search of this unknown adolescent. He combs the civil registers, writes to schools, finds a boarding school on rue de Picpus, walks the streets, and mingles with this investigation his own memories as an adolescent and those of his father under the Occupation.
Context
The author came across the missing-person notice in 1988. He first drew a novel from it, Voyage de noces, published in 1990, in which the girl bears another name, before taking up the inquiry into the real person. The book appeared from Gallimard in 1997. Joanna Kilmartin's English translation came out in 1999, under the title Dora Bruder in the United States and under that of The Search Warrant in the United Kingdom. The narrative interweaves archival documents, wanderings through Paris and the author's own memories, including his own running away at the age of fourteen.
Who it is for
A brief narrative, made of fragments in which inquiry, memories and documents mingle, for those who wish to read the memory of the Occupation at the scale of a single life.
Prizes and reception
The Nobel jury praised in the author an art of memory; a promenade in the eighteenth arrondissement of Paris now bears the name of Dora Bruder.
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