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Author: Edmund White
One in Bloomsbury - The Writer and the City series
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, esthetic or erotic.
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 Marais evokes the history
of Jews in France, just as 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.
The Flaneur is opinionated,
personal, subjective. As White 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.
From Publishers Weekly
The first in Bloomsbury's new, "occasional series" The Writer
and the City, White's (The Married Man) collection of impressions stands
in marked contrast to many travel books published today. The organizing
principle is the combined force of White's perception, imagination, frame
of reference and voice. He moves seamlessly from an eyeglasses museum to
the Hotel de Lauzun--home to Baudelaire as a young man--and a discussion
of the poet's dandyism and struggle with syphilis. White includes personal
memories and anecdotes of gay Paris--in both senses of the phrase--past
and present. "To be gay and cruise is perhaps an extension of the
flƒneur's very essence, or at least its most successful application," even
as the flaneur's wandering is "meant to be useless." White describes
his own favorite cruising spots as well as those of Louis XIV's homosexual
brother, and notes that Napoleon officially decriminalized homosexuality.
Other gems include a visit to the street where Colette lay bedridden with
arthritis and spied on Cocteau across the way, and a discussion of the
expatriation of African-Americans like Josephine Baker (Cocteau said of
her, "Eroticism has found a style") and Richard Wright (who wrote
of Paris, "There is such an absence of race hate that it seems a little
unreal"). White's charming book is for literati, voyeurs and aesthetes,
and for travelers who love familiar terrain from a different viewpoint.
© 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc. |
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$16.95 (hardcover)
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