Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [69]
Literary Paris, Jeffrey Kraft (Watson-Guptill, 1999). Though this book includes passages that are the author’s own very real observations and opinions, the inspiration for it is wholly literary, which is why I have included it in this section. As Kraft states, “My choice of text is just that, my own. I am only a devoted student of French literature,” and he has chosen choice lines from works by Apollinaire, Barthes, Baudelaire, Brillat-Savarin, Hugo, James, Joyce, Rimbaud, Saint-Exupéry, Sand, Stein, and Zola, just to name a few. Kraft’s black-and-white photos are quite nice, and his literary selections steered me toward a few works I was eager to read in full. I like the way he describes Paris as characterized by both grandeur and décadence (decline), Balzac and Proust: “While we are there it is the city of Balzac … yet in memory Paris is Proustian, a gradual unfolding backward.”
Mademoiselle Victorine, Debra Finerman (Three Rivers, 2007).
The Mark of the Angel, Nancy Huston (Vintage, 2000).
Mavis Gallant
Most of Gallant’s short stories are set in Paris or are about Parisians, or both, and her characters and scenes are unforgettable. In my favorite, “Across the Bridge,” Sylvie’s mother turns her leather bag, filled with Sylvie and Arnaud’s wedding invitations, upside down over the Seine—one of the most memorable short story images I’ve ever encountered. Other memorable stories are gathered in The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant (1996) and Overhead in a Balloon: Twelve Stories of Paris (1987), both published by Random House. These volumes are out of print—though very much worth tracking down—but New York Review of Books Classics has recently published two great editions, Paris Stories (2002) and The Cost of Living: Early and Uncollected Stories (2009).
Ernest Hemingway
I will always remember how reading Hemingway made me feel when I was a student in Paris—I loved reading his books and I was bursting with happiness. Years later, I came across the following quote in an article in Gourmet by Gene Bourg, and was relieved that someone else had “got it” and set things straight: “In A Moveable Feast Hemingway postulated that once a man has been young and happy in Paris, he can never be truly happy again. Agreeing with him would be very dangerous indeed. But agreeing and understanding are entirely different things.”
Over the years I went on to read just about everything Hemingway wrote, but it all began with A Moveable Feast and The Sun Also Rises. Both are set wholly or partly in Paris and both, I’m happy to say, are just as good in the rereading as they were thirty-two years ago.
Les Misérables, Victor Hugo.
The Moon and Sixpence, W. Somerset Maugham.
A Paris Hangover, Kirsten Lobe (St. Martin’s, 2006).
Pictures at an Exhibition, Sara Houghteling (Knopf, 2009).
Sarah’s Key, Tatiana de Rosnay (St. Martin’s, 2007).
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens.
The Year Is ’42, Nella Bielski (Pantheon, 2004).
Muriel Barbery
It was the title of Barbery’s novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog (Europa, 2008) that got my attention first, and then when I read that Renée, one of the main characters, is the concierge of twenty-seven years at “number 7, rue de Grenelle, a fine hôtel particulier with a courtyard and private gardens,” I was completely hooked. As a student I lived with a French family in a hôtel particulier also on the rue de Grenelle, also with a courtyard and private garden. The book turned out to be one of the best books I’ve ever read. Really. I have stuffed