Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [66]
Paris Times Eight: Finding Myself in the City of Dreams, Deirdre Kelly (Greystone, 2009). Kelly’s book is such a good read because she is truthful and self-deprecating and she has a passion for Paris that is utterly infectious. The “eight” in the title refers to eight life-changing and/or momentous visits to Paris, some of them made while on assignment for Toronto’s Globe and Mail, where she still works as a reporter at large.
The People of Paris, Joseph Barry (Doubleday, 1966). Though many references in this book, by a former correspondent for the New York Post, are dated, it’s still a good read, especially as a record of Paris just after World War II and in the 1950s and ’60s. It is indeed the people that Barry focuses on, as they are what interest him most. “France is never more French than when it is universal,” Barry writes. “When I am most exasperated with De Gaulle’s nationalism, I think of the beau geste of this Frenchman. One of the big people? One of the little people? One of the people of Paris.”
Petite Anglaise, Catherine Sanderson (Spiegel & Grau, 2008). The words “A True Story” appear at the bottom of this book’s cover, which is probably wise as the book looks and reads like a novel. Englishwoman Sanderson was realizing a dream when she moved to Paris, though not far into her teaching stint she recognized that something was missing from her experience. “I was living alongside the French, not among them. Observing French life, but never truly living it. A hairbreadth away from fulfilling my dreams. And yet sometimes this tiny gap seemed so unbridgeable.” But when she met a French man (Mr. Frog) at the Café Charbon and had a daughter with him (Tadpole), all this changed. She also started a blog (petiteanglaise.com), and her life changed again. Without revealing the rest of the story, I admit Sanderson’s tale didn’t end the way I wanted it to, but she didn’t then, and doesn’t now, ever want to leave Paris. (Sanderson now also has a son, and I was happy to read that she has “moved on” and no longer feels the need to document every detail of her personal life on her blog.)
The Piano Shop on the Left Bank, Thad Carhart (Random House, 2001). The title of this gem of a book appealed to me immediately because I took piano lessons for seven years when I was young. But you don’t have to know anything about pianos to love this memoir, inspired by a sign—DESFORGES PIANOS—on an ordinary storefront in Carhart’s Paris neighborhood. The people Carhart introduces us to, and their relationships to music and to each other, tell another, little-known story of Paris.
Return to Paris, Colette Rossant (Atria, 2003). If you, like me, are a fan of Rossant’s Memories of a Lost Egypt (Clarkson Potter, 1999) you will be predisposed to like this memoir as well. Rossant’s own family story is of interest, but the Paris she returns to in 1947—she was born there but spent eight years in Cairo—is an interesting subject as well. Early in her life, Rossant paid attention to food, and she shares a number of recipes here, some of which I’ve tried and liked. Rossant lives in New York now, but a large part of her will always be French.
The Sweet Life in Paris: Delicious Adventures in the World’s Most Glorious—and Perplexing—City, David Lebovitz (Broadway, 2009). This book includes more than forty recipes as well as a directory of culinary bonnes adresses, making it useful and valuable, but it’s also a great memoir of the years since Lebovitz, a dessert cookbook author and former pastry chef at Berkeley’s Chez Panisse, moved to Paris. It’s positively filled with insights, expressions, and new vocabulary words (my favorite: les bousculeurs, from the verb bousculer, meaning “to push abruptly in all directions” and referring to the habit Parisians have of cutting people off in line or walking on a sidewalk and expecting you to move out of their way; as Lebovitz notes, “they just refuse to be herded into straight lines”). I’ve made a handful of the recipes and they all turned out