Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [68]
FICTION
For classics titles listed here, multiple editions are generally available.
Babylon Revisited, F. Scott Fitzgerald.
The Blessing, Nancy Mitford (Vintage, 2010).
Birdsong, Charlotte Gray, and The Girl at the Lion d’Or, a trilogy by Sebastian Faulks, available from Vintage.
The Book of Salt, Monique Truong (Mariner, 2003).
The Children’s War, Monique Charlesworth (Knopf, 2004).
City of Darkness, City of Light: A Novel, Marge Piercy (Ballantine, 1996).
Claude & Camille: A Novel of Monet, Stephanie Cowell (Crown, 2010).
The Club Dumas, Arturo Pérez-Reverte (Harcourt, 1996).
Le Divorce (1997), Le Mariage (2000), L’Affaire (2003), all by Diane Johnson and published by Dutton.
Don’t Tell Alfred, Nancy Mitford (Vintage, 2010).
Fields of Glory, Jean Rouaud (Arcade, 1992). This is a beautifully written, slender little novel that was awarded the 1990 Prix Goncourt for best work of fiction in France.
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Victor Hugo.
Is Paris Burning?, Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre (Simon & Schuster, 1965).
Honoré de Balzac
Balzac (1799–1850) was the first novelist to place Paris at the heart of his fiction, and travelers have a number of Balzac novels from which to choose: Cousine Bette, Eugénie Grandet, Old Goriot, Lost Illusions, The Unknown Masterpiece, The Wrong Side of Paris.
Balzac’s Paris: A Guided Tour (balzacsparis.ucr.edu) is an outstanding online resource that I stumbled upon while working on this manuscript. It’s a promenade through the heart of Paris in the time of Balzac, described through some of his works and accompanied by maps and engravings, and it’s wonderful. The site is composed of materials from the Vernon Duke Collection in the special collections department of the University of California Riverside library. Duke was the songwriter who composed “April in Paris,” and his collection includes eight hundred books, rare maps, and other documents that present life and manners in Paris from the reign of Louis XVI to the end of the Belle Époque. To quote from the site, “One would have to go to the Musée Carnavalet in Paris to find a more comprehensive collection of original documents from this crucial time in the development of Paris.”
Many of the Parisian scenes that feature in Balzac’s novels take place along a route that’s very popular with tourists today—from the Arc de Triomphe to the Concorde, the rue de Rivoli and Palais Royal, the Louvre, and on to the Île de la Cité and the Latin Quarter. This route was the scene, to quote Balzac, of the greatest “splendors” and “miseries” of Parisian life during his time.
Alan Furst
“Astonishingly,” wrote Janet Maslin in the New York Times in 2000, “Alan Furst is not yet a household name.” If you don’t yet recognize his name, I urge you to read one of his very good thrillers (I doubt you will stop with just one), and if you do already know Furst’s name, I know you will agree with Maslin’s remark. I am not generally a reader of thrillers, and I even hesitate to refer to Furst’s books as thrillers, because they’re so much more—I prefer to think of them as espionage novels that are amazingly evocative and atmospheric. Paris is the backdrop, major or minor, in nearly all of his books. These include The World at Night (1996), Red Gold (1999), The Polish Officer (1995), Dark Star (1991), Night Soldiers (1988), The Foreign Correspondent (2006), and The Spies of Warsaw (2008), all currently available in Random House paperback editions. (Spies of the Balkans, published in 2010, is Furst’s most recent book, though the action takes place in Greece.)
Furst told New York Times writer Rachel Donadio that after he wrote a few desultory novels, “I suddenly realized there could be such a thing as a historical spy novel … but I went looking to read one and I couldn’t find one.” So he set out to write one, and the result was Night Soldiers. In a 2008 interview with Charles McGrath, also at the Times, Furst explained that the Europe he describes so perfectly in his books is largely a place he carries around in his head and visits