The Flaneur: A Stroll through the Paradoxes of Paris (Writer and the City) - Hardcover

White, Edmund

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1632863774 ISBN 13: 9781632863775

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 2016

Synopsis

A flaneur is a stroller, a loiterer, someone who ambles through a city without apparent purpose but is secretly attuned to the history of the place and in covert search of adventure, esthetic or erotic. Edmund White, who lived in Paris for sixteen years, wanders through the streets and avenues and along the quays, taking us into parts of Paris virtually unknown to visitors and indeed to many Parisians. Entering the Marais evokes the history of Jews in France, just as a visit to the Haynes Grill recalls the presence-festive, troubled-of black Americans in Paris for a century and a half. Gays, Decadents, even Royalists past and present are all subjected to the flaneur's scrutiny.

Edmund White's The Flaneur is opinionated, personal, subjective. As he conducts us through the bookshops and boutiques, past the monuments and palaces, filling us in on the gossip and background of each site, he allows us to see through the blank walls and past the proud edifices and to glimpse the inner, human drama. Along the way he recounts everything from the latest debates among French law-makers to the juicy details of Colette's life in the Palais Royal, even summoning up the hothouse atmosphere of Gustave Moreau's atelier.

About this title

Review:

Edmund White's reflections on Paris form the first in a series of alternative travel guides in which a writer takes readers on a personalised tour of their city. White fashions himself into Baudelaire's passionate observer, The Flâneur--"that aimless stroller who loses himself in the crowd, who has no destination and goes wherever caprice or curiosity directs his or her steps"--threaded with a Proustian sensibility, connecting personal and historical memories with locations. His chosen routes are the cracks that run through Haussmann's imperialist Paris, "the traces left by people living in the margin--Jews, blacks, gays, Arabs--or mementoes of an earlier, more chaotic and medieval France".

But even caprice is never entirely random. White retreats into the privatised public spaces of writers, artists and collectors: from the Hôtel de Lauzun where arty denizens including Balzac, Gautier, Manet and the ubiquitous Baudelaire attended exotic dinners parties fuelled by powerful hashish, to the Musée Camondo, built by a prominent banking family who were wiped out in the Holocaust. He maintains that the contemporary vitality of the city lies in the teeming quartiers where Arabs and blacks live, but, tellingly, rather than lead into a discussion of France's postcolonial history, White uses these areas to peer into the jazz-soundtracked encounter between Parisians and American blacks between the wars, the stage taken by Josephine Baker, Sidney Bechet, Richard Wright and James Baldwin. White is quintessentially an American in Paris and his struggle with the tensions between US identity politics and the universalist citizenship of France sometimes reveals more about the walker than the streets he walks, most especially in his discussion of AIDS in France.

White's Flâneur is the city guide as story-teller, rather than inventory-taker--a guidebook of which Walter Benjamin would have approved. The Flâneur is a jewel-box of a book offering rich rewards, which, while not serving up Paris as a list of sights for us to check, certainly conveys some of the city's aura in a beautifully compact format.--Fiona Buckland

Review:

"One has the impression, reading The Flaneur, of having fallen into the hands of a highly distractible, somewhat eccentric poet and professor who is determined to show you a Paris you wouldn't otherwise see . . . Edmund White tells such a good story that I'm ready to to listen to anything he wants to talk about." --New York Times Book Review

"White's charming book is for literati, voyeurs and aesthetes, and for travelers who love familiar terrain from a different viewpoint." --Publishers Weekly

"Lovely." --Los Angeles Times

"Brilliant." --Village Voice

"Vibrantly evocative." --Elle

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1632863774
• ISBN 13: 9781632863775
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224