Paris_ City Guide (Lonely Planet, 7th Edition) - Lonely Planet [24]
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The aim of Émile Zola, who came to Paris with his close friend Paul Cézanne in 1858, was to transform novel-writing from an art to a science by the application of experimentation. His theory may now seem naive, but his work influenced most significant French writers of the late 19th century and is reflected in much 20th-century fiction as well. His novel Nana tells the decadent tale of a young woman who resorts to prostitution to survive the Paris of the Second Empire.
Paul Verlaine and Stéphane Mallarmé created the symbolist movement, which strove to express states of mind rather than simply detail daily reality. Arthur Rimbaud, apart from crowding an extraordinary amount of exotic travel into his 37 years and having a tempestuous sexual relationship with Verlaine, produced two enduring pieces of work: Illuminations and Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell). Rimbaud stopped writing and deserted Europe for Africa in 1874, never to return. Verlaine died at 39 rue Descartes (5e) in 1896.
Marcel Proust dominated the early 20th century with his giant seven-volume novel À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (Remembrance of Things Past), which is largely autobiographical and explores in evocative detail the true meaning of past experience recovered from the unconscious by ‘involuntary memory’. In 1907 Proust moved from the family home near av des Champs-Élysées to the apartment on blvd Haussmann that was famous for its cork-lined bedroom (now on display at the Musée Carnavalet in the Marais, Click here) from which he almost never stirred. André Gide found his voice in the celebration of gay sensuality and, later, left-wing politics. Les Faux-Monnayeurs (The Counterfeiters) exposes the hypocrisy and self-deception to which people resort in order to fit in or deceive themselves.
André Breton led the group of French surrealists and wrote its three manifestos, although the first use of the word ‘surrealist’ is attributed to the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, a fellow traveller of surrealism who was killed in action in WWI. As a poet, Breton was overshadowed by Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose most famous surrealist novel was Le Paysan de Paris (Nightwalker). Colette (Sidonie-Gabriel Colette) enjoyed tweaking the nose of conventionally moral readers with titillating novels that detailed the amorous exploits of such heroines as the schoolgirl Claudine. Her best-known work is Gigi but far more interesting is Paris de Ma Fenêtre (Paris from My Window), dealing with the German occupation of Paris. Her view, by the way, was from 9 rue de Beaujolais in the 1er, overlooking the Jardin du Palais Royal.
After WWII, existentialism developed as a significant literary movement around Jean-Paul Sartre (Click here), Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus, who worked and conversed in the cafés of blvd St-Germain in the 6e. All three stressed the importance of the writer’s political engagement. L’Âge de Raison (The Age of Reason), the first volume of Sartre’s trilogy Les Chemins de la Liberté (The Roads to Freedom), is a superb Parisian novel; the subsequent volumes recall Paris immediately before and during WWII. De Beauvoir, author of Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex), had a profound influence on feminist thinking. Camus’ novel L’Étranger (The Stranger) reveals that the absurd is the condition of modern man, who feels himself a stranger – more accurately translated as ‘outsider’ in English – in his world.
In the late 1950s certain novelists began to look for new ways of organising narrative. The so-called nouveau roman (new novel) refers to the works of Nathalie Sarraute, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Boris Vian, Julien Gracq, Michel Butor and others. However, these writers never formed a close-knit group, and their experiments took them in divergent directions. Today the nouveau roman is very much out of favour in France though the authors’ names often appear