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At one point in his short autobiography "Un pedigree," Patrick Modiano, the winner of this year's Nobel Prize for Literature, says, "I will continue to mark those years, without nostalgia but with a hasty voice. It is not my fault if the words jostle one another. I must act quickly or I will not have the courage for it" (p84). The years Modiano is marking are those of his youth. The autobiography ends when he reaches twenty-one and formally breaks with his father. There is no reason for nostalgia for a time when he felt like a dog (hence the title) not really loved nor even wanted by a father, who mostly just wished to be rid of him, or a mother, who only gave him attention when she thought he could provide her with money. Neither parent wanted young Patrick to disrupt their raher insignificant lives. In fact, Modiano's father, who is really at the center of this work, remains a mystery, a sort of prototype of so many characters in Modiano's novels. He has a wide-range of somewhat shady associates and moves from place to place in Paris with considerable energy and apparent purpose, but neither the autobiographer nor the reader ever figures out exactly what he is up to. It does take courage to narrate all this precisely because Modiano's sense of hurt and vulnerability peaks through, even though he turns quickly from one surface detail to another--names, addresses, dates--as a way of distracting himself from distress about a childhood that was in an important sense never really his.