Product Description

A flaneur is a stroller, a loiterer, someone who ambles through a city without apparent purpose but is secretly attuned to the history of the place and in covert search of adventure, aesthetic or erotic. Edmund White, who lived in Paris for sixteen years, wanders through the streets and avenues and along the quays, taking us into parts of Paris virtually unknown to visitors and indeed to many Parisians. Entering the Marias evokes the history of Jews in France, just a visit to the Haynes grill recalls the presence - festive, troubled - of black Americans in Paris for a century and a half. Gays, Decadents, even Royalists past and present are all subjected to the flaneur's scrutiny. Edmund White's "The Flaneur" is opinionated, personal, subjective. As he conducts us through the bookshops and boutiques, past the monuments and palaces, filling us in on the gossip and background of each site, he allows us to see through the blank walls and past the proud edifices and to glimpse the inner, human drama. Along the way he recounts everything from the latest debates among French law-makers to the juicy details of Colette's life in the Palais Royal, even summoning up the hothouse atmosphere of Gustave Moreau's atelier. Coming soon in the series are: "Ahdaf Soueif on Cairo", "Peter Carey on Sydney" and "Rubem Fonseca on Rio".

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #322349 in Books
• Published on: 2001-02-19
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 224 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Edmund White's reflections on Paris form the first in a series of alternative travel guides in which a writer takes readers on a personalised tour of their city. White fashions himself into Baudelaire's passionate observer, The Flâneur--"that aimless stroller who loses himself in the crowd, who has no destination and goes wherever caprice or curiosity directs his or her steps"--threaded with a Proustian sensibility, connecting personal and historical memories with locations. His chosen routes are the cracks that run through Haussmann's imperialist Paris, "the traces left by people living in the margin--Jews, blacks, gays, Arabs--or mementoes of an earlier, more chaotic and medieval France".

But even caprice is never entirely random. White retreats into the privatised public spaces of writers, artists and collectors: from the Hôtel de Lauzun where arty denizens including Balzac, Gautier, Manet and the ubiquitous Baudelaire attended exotic dinners parties fuelled by powerful hashish, to the Musée Camondo, built by a prominent banking family who were wiped out in the Holocaust. He maintains that the contemporary vitality of the city lies in the teeming quartiers where Arabs and blacks live, but, tellingly, rather than lead into a discussion of France's postcolonial history, White uses these areas to peer into the jazz-soundtracked encounter between Parisians and American blacks between the wars, the stage taken by Josephine Baker, Sidney Bechet, Richard Wright and James Baldwin. White is quintessentially an American in Paris and his struggle with the tensions between US identity politics and the universalist citizenship of France sometimes reveals more about the walker than the streets he walks, most especially in his discussion of AIDS in France.

White's Flâneur is the city guide as story-teller, rather than inventory-taker--a guidebook of which Walter Benjamin would have approved. The Flâneur is a jewel-box of a book offering rich rewards, which, while not serving up Paris as a list of sights for us to check, certainly conveys some of the city's aura in a beautifully compact format.--Fiona Buckland

From the Publisher
Praise in the national press
"An artfully aimless pleasure cruise around Paris... what makes this book especially appealing is that it teems with private discoveries made public. It is good to read a refreshing un-journalistic take on the paradoxes of Paris... White finds France in the details he unearths." Guardian

"Edmund White leaves the tourists behind and reveals the best kept secrets in Paris." Harpers & Queen

"In choosing White to launch the series, the publishers have lived up to their promise. A stylish, deftly erudite and enormously diverting book. If they keep up the quality of their new series to this level, Bloomsbury could be on to a good thing" Sunday Telegraph

"White assumes the identity of a flâneur…a dandyish quality which suits him well. His style is gracious [and] the good bits are so delicious… that one is left wanting more" Sunday Times

"White's trademark style - elegantly off-the-cuff, bespoke casual, energetically sedate - is particularly well suited."

Independent

"Edmund White looks in at an outsider’s city. A good read, full of quirky information about the capital, it celebrates the activity of strolling idly through the city. " Independent On Sunday

"His Paris is a resident's, not a tourist's; that is one if the charms of this little book. He gives you a Paris that the guidebooks don't. A delight... no one who loves Paris should neglect it" Literary Review

"Steeped in philosophical observation, White's tour nonchalant tour traces a course through this quintessentially walker's city... investing the areas he comes across with the haunting resonance of his own solitary imaginings." Daily Express

"A welter of impressionistic detail and personal observation" Evening Standard

"The Flaneur is a very good and beautifully written short study of Paris, one that every prospective visitor, and indeed, every old Paris hand, should have in his or her suitcase." Irish Times

"[An] elegant, intimate little book, the first in a welcome new series on " The Writer and the City" Daily Telegraph

"White lived in Paris for 16 years, until 1998, and the vision of Paris he conjures up in this handsome little book is a highly personal one, free of nostalgia, and up-to-the-minute." Spectator

"Full of dark diversions and delightful French fancies. Intimate and idiosyncratic… [it offers] a thought-provoking antidote to the practicalities of the average travel guide. White has a sharp sense of humour and one of the aspects which make this book so enjoyable to read is the wealth of anecdotal information." The Scotsman

"The book is an ideal accompaniment if you were going on a weekend to Paris". Bookseller

"Providing a light and thoroughly entertaining history, White takes us behind the grand facades to bring forth the human dramas and multi-faceted nature of an exciting world city." Geographical

About the Author
Edmund White is the author of many books includingA BOY'S OWN STORY and most recently THE MARRIED MAN. He has been made an officer in the French Order of Arts and Letters and last year received a literary prize from the Festival of Deauville. Ten of his books have been translated into French, including his magisterial biography of Jean Genet.

Customer Reviews

An affectionate and telling portrait
The tone of this lovely book is set from the start. I laughed when I read the first sentence, I smiled at the second, and by the end of the first chapter I was already packing my bags (metaphorically), boarding the train, and longing to be in Paris.

Edmund White is an accomplished writer who lived in Paris for fifteen years, from about 1983, before returning to his native USA. If he was in love with the French (which seems likely) it was never to the extent to being blinded to their flaws. Taking the notion of the Flaneur, the attentive urban ambler, as his inspiration he takes a gentle and informative stroll through some of the lesser known byways of the French capital, and French history, pausing to point out curious features and to cast light along the way.

Somehow, without ever forcing the pace, he manages to explore art, politics, and sex. He discusses the paradoxical attitudes of the French to race discrimination and the appallingly inadequate response of the state to AIDs in the 1980s. He examines the contrasts between the American and French attitudes to fashion. He ponders on flirtatiousness - how it cannot be avoided in Paris and how it cannot be attempted in New York. He muses upon the creation and endless re-invention of cities, . He writes perceptively about jazz music between the wars, including the danse sauvage of Josephine Baker and its effect upon (amongst others) Marshall Tito, and he struggles (as must we all) with the precise distinction between monarchist and royalist that so exercised the proprietor of his local café. There are many reasons for reading this book. One is that it is beautifully written (it helps). Another is that, without ever losing the objectivity of the foreigner, the author manages to empathise with his subject. When I finished reading it I wanted to start again.

The publishers, Bloomsbury, are to be complimented on producing a first class book. The Flaneur is intended to be the first in a series entitled The Writer in the City. If subsequent volumes match the quality if the first then there is a great deal to look forward to.

If you like Paris, take this and fall in love!
Highly recommended. Despite the heading, I did not really like Paris. When I visited Paris first, I lived in Zurich and from the Swiss orderliness to the bohemian French territory was a systemic shock to me. But over time I have read a few books about Paris and am now eagerly waiting for my next trip.

The Flaneur literally means a loiterer but purposeless this book is not. Loitering is also a slower description of the pace of this book. The visually driven descriptions of Paris intersperse beautifully with the history of how Paris came to be like it is. Through centuries of music, art and literature. The author is not just well-researched, he also has the qualification of being in love with Paris. So read it, I say and fall in love with Paris.

Reads like a hack job done for the money
This is a very disappointing book. It is subtitled "a stroll through the paradoxes" of Paris but there is very little of the contemporary city in it. Nor is there much strolling. For example, Edmund White starts a chapter on the Marais district but quickly digresses to the Jewish figures who lived near the Bois de Bologne in the 19th century then a long explication of the Dreyfus case. All of this can be read in any French history book and none of it is particularly Parisien. Likewise, his chapter on gay cruising has limited appeal - why do homosexual writers think they have to tell us the details of their sex lives which White himself admits most people will find "pathetic and sordid"? He gives a detailed bibliography at the end which confesses that he has plundered most of this from other people's books which makes it seem very like a hack job done without much care. There is little, if anything, here for anyone wanting to research before a trip to Paris. An up-to-date guidebook would be far more useful.