Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [70]
Gourmet Rhapsody (Europa, 2009) is equally brilliant and unique, and takes place in the same building. The “greatest food critic in the world,” Pierre Arthens, is dying, and his last wish is to identify a flavor that he can’t remember. He knows that “this particular flavor is the first and ultimate truth of my entire life,” and he knows that the flavor dates back to childhood or adolescence, predating his vocation as a food critic. In alternating chapters we meet members of Arthens’s family and others in the building, and after Arthens relates some of the best eating experiences of his life, we do finally learn the flavor he’s searching for in the final chapter. (I didn’t guess it, and I will only say that it comes as a bit of a surprise.)
Novel Ideas
“Novel Ideas” was the title of a March 2009 article written by David Burke in the (wonderful) former Paris Notes newsletter. In it, Burke—who moved to Paris in 1986 intending to stay for a year but has now been there twenty-five—shares a quote by Italian writer Leonardo Sciascia that I love: “Paris is a book city, a written city, a printed city. A book city made of thousands of books. A city that might be called a library’s dream, if a library had the ability to dream.” And Burke had the envious task of living that dream while he worked on his unique and engaging book Writers in Paris: Literary Lives in the City of Light (Counterpoint, 2008). He had the opportunity to page through books, study maps, paintings, and photographs, and walk all over the city tracking down literary sites. “All of this was rich and rewarding,” he notes, “but what really brought Paris to life for me were the great Paris novels and the lives of their characters, who illuminated the soul of the city.”
His book is filled with dozens and dozens of authors and works of fiction, as well as maps, so readers may craft literary itineraries of their own. Burke writes that “immersion creates its rewards,” a statement with which I wholeheartedly agree, and he aptly observes that our appreciation of writers’ lives and work, and Paris itself, “is heightened by following them from place to place in our imaginations or, even better, in our walking shoes.”
WALKING TOURS
There are many ways to walk around Paris. You can set yourself precise destinations, or just drift along. With a guidebook in hand, you can try to systematically explore a neighborhood, or else you can just take the first bus that comes along and ride it to the end of the line, or you can try to go places by taking a different route from the one you normally take. Or else you can devise a route by deliberately imposing arbitrary rules that will restrict matters even more, such as, for example, taking streets whose names begin with the same letter, or going exclusively in alphabetical order, or in some particular chronology. In practice, these itineraries are extremely difficult to work out. During the course of one’s walks, with the aid of guidebooks and maps, one can follow them more or less in their entirety. For the stroller who restricts himself like that, Paris becomes a giant labyrinth that during the course of his peregrinations gives him the feeling of having left the beaten path.
—Georges Perec, Paris
While it’s always nice to simply wander aimlessly, have a day or two on your trip without a single plan or reservation, it’s equally important that other days be more structured, with sites to