Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [32]
Since 1998, Literary Traveler has been featuring great travel writing, and the online archive is quite large. I’ve found some really wonderful pieces on Paris and other parts of France and beyond. A basic subscription is free, although access to some content is limited; there is a monthly fee for a premium subscription, which offers full access to the site’s content. The Web site is very well done and was named to Forbes’s Best of the Web. Literary Traveler also offers tours, such as a Lost Generation literary tour in Paris and a French Resistance tour in Lyon.
Somewhere in France, John Rolfe Gardiner (Knopf, 1999).
Suite Française (2006) and Fire in the Blood (2007), both by Irène Némirovsky and published by Knopf. If Némirovsky’s fiction inspires you to want to know more about her real life, you may also like The Life of Irène Némirovsky, 1903–1942 by Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt (Knopf, 2010), as well as Shadows of a Childhood by Elisabeth Gille (New Press, 1998). Gille, Némirovsky’s daughter, was five years old when her mother was deported to Auschwitz, and she and her sister were hidden in the French countryside until the war was over. This novel—her third, and the first to appear in English—won the Grand Prix des Lectrices de Elle in 1997. Gille died in Paris in 1996.
That Mad Ache, Françoise Sagan (Basic Books, 2009). This unique edition also includes a tandem work, Translator, Trader: An Essay on the Pleasantly Pervasive Paradoxes of Translation by Douglas Hofstadter, the translator of the Sagan work. Printed in the reverse from the novel (starting at the last page), Hofstadter reveals some of his own thoughts about translations in general as well as revelations he had while translating Sagan’s novel, which was originally published in 1965 under the title La Chamade.
KEEPING THE ART DE VIVRE IN YOUR LIFE
A trip anywhere in the world can be transforming, but there’s no doubt that Paris (or anywhere in France, for that matter) is a particularly inspiring destination. France is seductive, and many people—myself included—have a great desire to incorporate many French lifestyle details into their lives. Happily, there are some great resources to help us Francophiles re-create a French spirit in our homes.
Bringing France Home: Creating the Feeling of France in Your Home Room by Room, Cheryl MacLachlan with photographs by Ivan Terestchenko (Clarkson Potter, 1995). MacLachlan worked for Esquire a few decades ago and traveled to Paris on business four to five times a year. Each time she returned to New York, she felt that she was missing something, though it wasn’t a case of wanting to move to France—she loved her job and her life. “The answer,” she decided, “perhaps was to try to make France a part of my day-to-day life back home.” So she did, but then she took this answer one step further, and examined the French lifestyle and explored just what it was that made France France. Discovering that “French life was in the details,” MacLachlan found it possible to bring France home to America. She takes readers on a tour of every room in a French house and offers tips galore; there are also chapters on the pleasures of the table and on resources.
Bringing Paris Home, Penny Drue Baird (Monacelli Press, 2008). “Step outside the door, glance around, and you know you are in Paris,” writes Baird, founder of the design firm Dessins and one of Architectural Digest’s top one hundred designers. “What is it about just being there that creates a stir within us? All at once, we are surrounded by physical beauty and by ethereal stimuli—the smell of the streets, the sky, the street signs, the light. Can the air really be that different? … This heightened sensual experience stays with us throughout our visit. Can we bring it home?” In chapters detailing architecture,