The Flaneur (Writer and the City)

• Hardcover - 21 March, 2001 - Bloomsbury USA
• Usually ships in 24 hours
• By: Edmund White and Edmund White
• ISBN: 1582341354

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About this book

If a place is best known by its particulars, then Edmund White is an expert on Paris. Fortunately, he's generous with his secrets: he reveals a Paris not found in any other guide in this first book in the Writer and the City series. White's Paris is seen on foot, as a flâneur, a stroller who aimlessly loses himself in a crowd, going wherever curiosity leads him and collecting impressions along the way. Paris is the perfect city for the flâneur, as every quartier is beautiful and full of rich and surprising delights. But this is no typical tour of monuments and museums; it is much more intimate and surprising. As a flâneur of Paris for 16 years, White knows where to find the very best of everything--silver, sheets, plum slivovitz. He can tell you where to get Tex-Mex surrounded by a dance rehearsal hall, where to rent an entire castle for a party, or even where to get Skippy peanut butter. He eschews the pearl-gray city built by Napoleon and roams the places where the real vitality lives, the teaming quartiers inhabited by Arabs and Asians and Africans, the strange corners, the markets where you can find absolutely anything in this city that accommodates all tastes. White's Paris is a place rich in history with a passion for novelty and distractions. So a walk through the Jewish ghetto leads to the history of the little-known Musée Nissim de Camondo, with its impressive collection of Louis XV and Louis XVI furniture, created by a family of Jewish bankers ultimately killed in the Holocaust. White shares other favorite and obscure museums, such as the Hôtel du Lauzun, where writers like Balzac and Charles Baudelaire and the painter Edouard Manet met for long evenings of music and hashish-induced hallucinations. Reminiscences in Montmartre reach back to the thriving jazz culture created by African Americans in the years between the world wars and include stories about Josephine Baker, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin. While White may ignore Notre Dame, he has fascinating tidbits to share about kings and queens and their heirs who still fight for the throne. The variety of Paris, White remarks, is matched by the voraciousness and passion of its people. With his own remarkable flair, he reveals a thriving and alluring city where tourists rarely tread. --Lesley Reed

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Reviews by readers

Annoyed By Most Travel Books?

Edmund White gives a very different "travel book" in FLANEUR: A STROLL THROUGH THE PARADOXES OF PARIS. If you don't delight in books that compare prices of hotels and restaurants or books in which the author traces the difficulty of restoring and furbishing a fabulous villa all while beguiling and amusing the locals then White's book will offer you a refreshing alternative.

Sixteen-year resident, White, offers a view of Paris that is at once personal and historical. It is more accurately described as a memoir of Paris rather than a standard travel book. One feels as though a friend is offering a leisurely tour of the city showing you his favorite places and telling stories offering insight and historical tidbits not dragging you through a checklist as an impersonal tourist. The changes in neighborhoods and the histories he describes particularly those of expatriate Americans in Paris are all insightful. White's tone is erudite and conversational without being tedious or condescending. The term flaneur is key in the title. The pace of the book is strolling but always interesting. It seems to have no direction but the end result is both illuminating and satisfying. Most remarkably it offers an enjoyable read whether one is immediately traveling to Paris or armchair traveling or whether one is living in a villa in Europe or a small apartment in the States.

Cruising Paris

Of course this isn't really about cruising. If it were it would be awfully boring, and this book is anything but boring. Even so, there is nothing quite so pleasurable as a stroll down almost any street in the French capital. Edmund white, who lived there for a long time, offers a distillation of his experience in this delightful little book. Reading it is almost as good as being there. Second best. Whie writes elegantly and intelligently. The part I most enjoyed, and from which I learned most, is about the Camondo Museum and the tragedy of the family that built and owned it. After reading this book I went to visit it and it turned out to be all White says it is. Delightful. But the book contains other wonderful descriptions of people and places as well. Highly recommended.

Step back in time

I bought this book while holidaying in the Marais in the summer of 2005. I read it on my return to Sydney as a means of returning to the backstreets of Paris as I also remember it.

If you've been to Paris much of this book will seem familiar. If you haven't, It's the closest you'll come to enjoying the pleasures of this most magnificent city.

Much like Paris itself, this book is brilliant.

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