Paris to the Moon

• Paperback - 11 September, 2001 - Random House Trade Paperbacks
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• By: Adam Gopnik
• ISBN: 0375758232

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About this book

In 1995 Gopnik was offered the plush assignment of writing the "Paris Journals" for the New Yorker. He spent five years in Paris with his wife, Martha, and son, Luke, writing dispatches now collected here along with previously unpublished journal entries. A self-described "comic-sentimental essayist," Gopnik chose the romance of Paris in its particulars as his subject. Gopnik falls in unabashed love with what he calls Paris's commonplace civilization--the cafés, the little shops, the ancient carousel in the park, and the small, intricate experiences that happen in such settings. But Paris can also be a difficult city to love, particularly its pompous and abstract official culture with its parallel paper universe. The tension between these two sides of Paris and the country's general brooding over the decline of French dominance in the face of globalization (haute couture, cooking, and sex, as well as the economy, are running deficits) form the subtexts for these finely wrought and witty essays. With his emphasis on the micro in the macro, Gopnik describes trying to get a Thanksgiving turkey delivered during a general strike and his struggle to find an apartment during a government scandal over favoritism in housing allocations. The essays alternate between reports of national and local events and accounts of expatriate family life, with an emphasis on "the trinity of late-century bourgeois obsessions: children and cooking and spectator sports, including the spectator sport of shopping." Gopnik describes some truly delicious moments, from the rites of Parisian haute couture, to the "occupation" of a local brasserie in protest of its purchase by a restaurant tycoon, to the birth of his daughter with the aid of a doctor in black jeans and a black silk shirt, open at the front. Gopnik makes terrific use of his status as an observer on the fringes of fashionable society to draw some deft comparisons between Paris and New York ("It is as if all American appliances dreamed of being cars while all French appliances dreamed of being telephones") and do some incisive philosophizing on the nature of both. This is masterful reportage with a winning infusion of intelligence, intimacy, and charm. --Lesley Reed

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• Walking Paris: Thirty Original Walks In and Around Paris
• Almost French: Love and a New Life In Paris
• Almost French: Love and a New Life in Paris

Reviews by readers

Beautiful writing, warm, personal narrative, intimate story telling

Contrary to many of the reviews provided for this book, I have cherished this book as one of my favorite books on France. I lived in Tokyo, Japan as an expat for five years and felt an immediate kindred spirit with the author. I found my own personal experiences to be not that different from his own and related to many of his experiences on a deep, personal level. His gift of prosaic writing is a rare and wonderful treat within the travel essay genre, and I was delighted to be invited in to such an intimate and personal account of life in Paris. While most travel essay books are written by amateur writers, offering shallow accounts of brief stays in foreign lands, this book combines the rare writing talents of Adam Gopnik along with a fascinating, intimate portrait of Paris, a city that offers so much but which reveals so little for most of us who don't have the time to absorb and observe and experience what he was able to enjoy and write about for the rest of us.

Love this book!

I wanted this book to go on forever. I found it to be a very comforting, curl up in front of the fire, listening to jazz kind of book. Maybe I relate to it because I have to boys and adore Paris, I don't know... but I really enjoyed it.

It is completely unlike other books about Paris-- which I read whenever I get the chance. It is much more about the family in Paris than Paris itself, which gives a completely different perspective (obviously, since everyone would experience a place differently). Anyway, I fell in love with the entire family and Paris all over again.

4.5 stars is a good read, as long as you are not expecting something it's not.

It's not an atmospheric travel memoir; it's not a memoir of youth (except in so far as a father relates to his young son); it's not "Almost French".
But it is an extremely good insight into recent French politics; And it is an American journalist's documented 'thinking about the French and trying to understand them/describe them/contrast with them'; Expect lots of politics, and you should well enjoy.

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