FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES
A Pointillist Tour, Revolution to Riots
From “Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris”
“Barricade on the Boulevard Saint-Germain near Rue Hautefeuille, May 1968,” a photograph by Alain Dejean.
By DWIGHT GARNER
If you’d like a status update on Britain’s tangled feelings about its neighbor France, you could do worse than study The Sunday Times of London’s current hardcover nonfiction best-seller list. At No. 9 is the book in front of us now: the British historian Graham Robb’s admiring “Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris.” More beloved by English readers, though, at No. 4, is a book by Stephen Clarke with this impish title: “1000 Years of Annoying the French.” Garçon, there’s some snark in my soup.
PARISIANS
An Adventure History of Paris
By Graham Robb
Illustrated. 476 pages. W. W. Norton & Company. $28.95.
The appearance of one of Mr. Robb’s books on an English best-seller list, or any best-seller list, says good things about the state of British-French relations. It says even better things about the state of literary culture. That’s because Mr. Robb, over the course of a half-dozen books, including excellent biographies of Balzac, Victor Hugo and Rimbaud, and a volume called “The Discovery of France,” has proved himself to be one of the more unusual and appealing historians currently striding the planet. In a better world his books would be best sellers everywhere.
To observe that Mr. Robb’s books are unusual is to say several things at once. Most obviously, they sometimes apply hardy, free-range kinds of research. “The Discovery of France” was given a jolt of life by his back-road explorations on a bicycle. (“This book,” he wrote, “is the result of 14,000 miles in the saddle and four years in the library.”) They also take unusual forms. In Mr. Robb’s new book one chapter is written like a screenplay, while another employs witty question-and-answer sections that function like lemon juice squeezed over a platter of oysters. Clearly Mr. Robb is restless, and he has little interest in being a droning, by-the-numbers tour guide.
It’s not hard, however, to think up ways to write stunt history. What’s truly unusual about Mr. Robb is the amount of real feeling and human playfulness he smuggles into his books, those unmistakable signs of a mind that’s wide awake and breathing on the page.
Did I mention that he is also jaggedly funny? His prose approximates Ian McEwan’s by way of Anthony Lane. In his new book a group of Parisians in the Latin Quarter in the 1840s don’t die from disease, they die from “various illnesses known collectively as ‘lack of money.’ ”
“Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris” arrives with an odd subtitle (adventure history?) that makes it sound as if it were written on a skateboard and sponsored by Mountain Dew. Here’s what this book really is: a pointillist and defiantly nonlinear history of Paris from the dawn of the French Revolution through the 2005 riots in Clichy-sous-Bois, told from a variety of unlikely perspectives and focusing on lesser-known but reverberating moments in the city’s history.
Among the set pieces here is an account of a young Napoleon losing his virginity to a prostitute in the Palais Royal; a portrait of the man who created the catacombs; and an investigation into how Marie Antoinette, while attempting to flee the city to save her life, became lost just a few yards from home.
There’s much more: disquisitions on police work and photographers and playwrights and France’s strange DeLillo-ish history of faked political assassinations; a portrait of Émile Zola’s long-suffering wife; an inquiry into the links between alchemy and the early days of nuclear fission; an account of Hitler’s short tour of Paris’s landmarks; a view of the affair between Juliette Gréco, the actress and later singer, and a young Miles Davis; an assessment of the 1968 student riots; and a glimpse at the politics of Nicolas Sarkozy and the roiling discontents of recent French immigration.
Mr. Robb builds his histories from small piles of angular details. The section on Napoleon begins by observing “the army of wet nurses who left their babies at home and went to sell their breast milk in the capital.” During an account of one policeman’s search for a criminal who is also a hunchback, Mr. Robb can’t help noting the difficulties: “there were something in the region of 6,135 hunchbacks in Paris.” Once Zola discovered cameras, he writes, he tended to “behave as though he was always about to be photographed.”
Mr. Robb’s prose is fleet and ingenious. He describes the “sucking sound” of modern French police sirens, the “snickering” of certain neon signs, the melodious “parping of automobiles.” His good humor is infectious. When young men were finally allowed to visit young women in Parisian college dormitories in the 1960s, he writes that they brought “wine, cigarettes, Tunisian pâtisseries, hot dogs and erections.” Describing the soulless towers in immigrant suburban Paris, he notes dryly: “The planes coming in to land at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle always missed them, but the towers were falling apart anyway.”
Mr. Robb pores over old newspapers, tour guides and photographs. (About one favorite picture, he writes: “So much information is contained in that split-second burst of photons that if the glass plate survived a holocaust and lay buried under rubble for centuries in a leather satchel, there would be enough to compile a small, speculative encyclopedia of Paris in the late second millennium.”)
He is just as familiar with resources like CNN and eBay, and into a discussion of Quasimodo’s climbing abilities, he casually drops a mention of parkour.
He extends his embrace to Paris’s new wave of Arab immigrants. “Their Paris was a rap litany of place names that only the most exhaustive guide book would have recognized as the City of Light: Clichy-sous-Bois, La Courneuve, Aubervilliers, Bondy,” he writes. But he adds: “They, too, were children of Paris, and, like true natives of the city, they expressed their pride in angry words that sounded like a curse.”
Mr. Robb’s animating idea during the composition of “Parisians,” he declares, “was to create a kind of mini-Human Comedy of Paris, in which the history of the city would be illuminated by the real experience of its inhabitants.”
Through friends in Paris, Mr. Robb writes, he learned things: “a certain Parisian art de vivre: sitting in traffic jams as a form of flânerie, parking illegally as a defense of personal liberty, savoring window displays as though the streets were a public museum.”
He goes on: “They taught me the tricky etiquette of pretending to argue with waiters, and the gallantry of staring at beautiful strangers.” His book — argumentative, gallant, parked athwart oncoming historical traffic, as if on a dare — is as Parisian and as bracing as a freshly mixed Pernod and water.
From “Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris”
“Barricade on the Boulevard Saint-Germain near Rue Hautefeuille, May 1968,” a photograph by Alain Dejean.
By DWIGHT GARNER
If you’d like a status update on Britain’s tangled feelings about its neighbor France, you could do worse than study The Sunday Times of London’s current hardcover nonfiction best-seller list. At No. 9 is the book in front of us now: the British historian Graham Robb’s admiring “Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris.” More beloved by English readers, though, at No. 4, is a book by Stephen Clarke with this impish title: “1000 Years of Annoying the French.” Garçon, there’s some snark in my soup.
PARISIANS
An Adventure History of Paris
By Graham Robb
Illustrated. 476 pages. W. W. Norton & Company. $28.95.
The appearance of one of Mr. Robb’s books on an English best-seller list, or any best-seller list, says good things about the state of British-French relations. It says even better things about the state of literary culture. That’s because Mr. Robb, over the course of a half-dozen books, including excellent biographies of Balzac, Victor Hugo and Rimbaud, and a volume called “The Discovery of France,” has proved himself to be one of the more unusual and appealing historians currently striding the planet. In a better world his books would be best sellers everywhere.
To observe that Mr. Robb’s books are unusual is to say several things at once. Most obviously, they sometimes apply hardy, free-range kinds of research. “The Discovery of France” was given a jolt of life by his back-road explorations on a bicycle. (“This book,” he wrote, “is the result of 14,000 miles in the saddle and four years in the library.”) They also take unusual forms. In Mr. Robb’s new book one chapter is written like a screenplay, while another employs witty question-and-answer sections that function like lemon juice squeezed over a platter of oysters. Clearly Mr. Robb is restless, and he has little interest in being a droning, by-the-numbers tour guide.
It’s not hard, however, to think up ways to write stunt history. What’s truly unusual about Mr. Robb is the amount of real feeling and human playfulness he smuggles into his books, those unmistakable signs of a mind that’s wide awake and breathing on the page.
Did I mention that he is also jaggedly funny? His prose approximates Ian McEwan’s by way of Anthony Lane. In his new book a group of Parisians in the Latin Quarter in the 1840s don’t die from disease, they die from “various illnesses known collectively as ‘lack of money.’ ”
“Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris” arrives with an odd subtitle (adventure history?) that makes it sound as if it were written on a skateboard and sponsored by Mountain Dew. Here’s what this book really is: a pointillist and defiantly nonlinear history of Paris from the dawn of the French Revolution through the 2005 riots in Clichy-sous-Bois, told from a variety of unlikely perspectives and focusing on lesser-known but reverberating moments in the city’s history.
Among the set pieces here is an account of a young Napoleon losing his virginity to a prostitute in the Palais Royal; a portrait of the man who created the catacombs; and an investigation into how Marie Antoinette, while attempting to flee the city to save her life, became lost just a few yards from home.
There’s much more: disquisitions on police work and photographers and playwrights and France’s strange DeLillo-ish history of faked political assassinations; a portrait of Émile Zola’s long-suffering wife; an inquiry into the links between alchemy and the early days of nuclear fission; an account of Hitler’s short tour of Paris’s landmarks; a view of the affair between Juliette Gréco, the actress and later singer, and a young Miles Davis; an assessment of the 1968 student riots; and a glimpse at the politics of Nicolas Sarkozy and the roiling discontents of recent French immigration.
Mr. Robb builds his histories from small piles of angular details. The section on Napoleon begins by observing “the army of wet nurses who left their babies at home and went to sell their breast milk in the capital.” During an account of one policeman’s search for a criminal who is also a hunchback, Mr. Robb can’t help noting the difficulties: “there were something in the region of 6,135 hunchbacks in Paris.” Once Zola discovered cameras, he writes, he tended to “behave as though he was always about to be photographed.”
Mr. Robb’s prose is fleet and ingenious. He describes the “sucking sound” of modern French police sirens, the “snickering” of certain neon signs, the melodious “parping of automobiles.” His good humor is infectious. When young men were finally allowed to visit young women in Parisian college dormitories in the 1960s, he writes that they brought “wine, cigarettes, Tunisian pâtisseries, hot dogs and erections.” Describing the soulless towers in immigrant suburban Paris, he notes dryly: “The planes coming in to land at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle always missed them, but the towers were falling apart anyway.”
Mr. Robb pores over old newspapers, tour guides and photographs. (About one favorite picture, he writes: “So much information is contained in that split-second burst of photons that if the glass plate survived a holocaust and lay buried under rubble for centuries in a leather satchel, there would be enough to compile a small, speculative encyclopedia of Paris in the late second millennium.”)
He is just as familiar with resources like CNN and eBay, and into a discussion of Quasimodo’s climbing abilities, he casually drops a mention of parkour.
He extends his embrace to Paris’s new wave of Arab immigrants. “Their Paris was a rap litany of place names that only the most exhaustive guide book would have recognized as the City of Light: Clichy-sous-Bois, La Courneuve, Aubervilliers, Bondy,” he writes. But he adds: “They, too, were children of Paris, and, like true natives of the city, they expressed their pride in angry words that sounded like a curse.”
Mr. Robb’s animating idea during the composition of “Parisians,” he declares, “was to create a kind of mini-Human Comedy of Paris, in which the history of the city would be illuminated by the real experience of its inhabitants.”
Through friends in Paris, Mr. Robb writes, he learned things: “a certain Parisian art de vivre: sitting in traffic jams as a form of flânerie, parking illegally as a defense of personal liberty, savoring window displays as though the streets were a public museum.”
He goes on: “They taught me the tricky etiquette of pretending to argue with waiters, and the gallantry of staring at beautiful strangers.” His book — argumentative, gallant, parked athwart oncoming historical traffic, as if on a dare — is as Parisian and as bracing as a freshly mixed Pernod and water.
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