Review by New York Times Review
?? TO VISIT PARIS in 1949 with Nelson Algren! In town on a trip to see his lover, Simone de Beauvoir, Algren attended dinners with Juliette Gréco and Miles Davis, spent nights drinking whiskey and grapefruit gin with Richard Wright at the Montana Bar, dropped in on cocktail parties at Gallimard and attended an evening cabaret performance by Yves Montand. But since we can't "cue up the good old days on YouTtibe," as the contemporary British writer Matthew de Abaitua has put it, we'll have to turn to books like Agnes Poirier's "Left Bank" to stoke our historical FOMO. A journalist who was born in Paris and educated in London, Poirier knows that we expect many things when we consider the mythic figures who populated Paris in the 1940s. They appeared outsize in their own time too. The young of that era looked to Sartre, Beauvoir, MerleauPonty, Camus and their friends to change the world, but they inevitably disappointed. How could they not? Carefully combing through an impressive amount of material, Poirier assembles the history of a decade in Paris as she tries to explain how these figures came to loom so large. And what a difference a decade makes - the period just before midcentury saw two republics and an occupation, the rise of communism and the beginning of both the Cold War and the war in Indochina. "Left Bank" moves scene to scene, cafe to cafe, tracing the affiliations and intrigues of a group of writers, philosophers, artists and curators whose lives were, as Poirier puts it, "shaped by the ordeals" of World War II and whose fates coincided in the service of art and revolution. Spared destruction by a sentimental Nazi who couldn't bear to blow the place up, as Hitler had instructed, Paris recuperated from the war with miraculous speed. In Poirier's account, the city seems more like a small town where everyone knew everyone and together faced down the enemy, then took on the task of building a new world in the ashes of the old. This, of course, wasn't the case, and Poirier's sometimes narrow focus presents a rather elite version of the period. Consider, for example, the 1947 debut of Christian Dior's New Look, using yards and yards of fabric to create full calf-length skirts - utterly shocking after the necessary parsimony of wartime. The British historian Andrew Hussey has described a Dior photo shoot in the working-class streets of Montmartre when the local women "flew at the models, ripping the clothes to shreds in anger and disgust." In contrast, Poirier loftily extols the way Dior "reintroduced glamour and luxury," the way he "invented a new sexy silhouette," reminding us that Hollywood stars demanded to be dressed by him. This is typical of the way the breathless mythology of the era, to which none of us are immune, can obscure the way we see it. Poirier buys into the "glamour and luxury" at moments like these, but who can really blame her? Poirier's account of the decade explores a crucial moment at which prewar and postwar culture came together. She drops in on Marlon Brando watching Eartha Kitt sing at Cocteau's old haunt, Le Boeuf sur le Tóit ("Cherije vous aime beaucoupje ne sais pas what to do"), and accompanies Beauvoir on a visit to an aging Alberto Giacometti, who, 20 years past his peak, is finally having a breakthrough. And she's particularly attentive to Richard Wright's association with Sartre and Beauvoir's journal, Les Temps Modernes, emphasizing the meaningful contributions Wright made to French intellectual life. Far from romanticizing the American expat community, Poirier gives us some unflattering portraits of visiting writers. Arriving in 1948, James Baldwin, although welcomed by Wright, promptly tore him apartin his essay "Everybody's Protest Novel." Poirier suggests that Norman Mailer's prickliness was learned from the French. And in her portrait Saul Bellow, forever dissatisfied, coming and going between his wife and family on the Right Bank and his writer's studio and bachelor lifestyle on the Left, is just really annoying. As group biographies go, "Left Bank" lacks the weightiness of Sarah Bakewell's "At the Existentialist Café." But Poirier excels on a different level, going just beyond the shallows without venturing into the depths. And it's here that we can best observe the wonderful material details of history that have accrued beneath the waters. She notes, for instance, that the "Mona Lisa" was driven away from Paris before the war in "an ambulance specially fitted with elastic rubber-sprung suspension." And on Aug. 24,1944, when the Radiodiffusion de la Nation Française appealed to the priests of Paris to ring their church bells, announcing the beginning of the Liberation, "the 258-year-old lowest-pitch bourdon of Notre Dame Cathedral, the 13-ton bell known as Emmanuel, Notre Dame's largest, rang out in F sharp so loudly that it would be heard at least five miles away." In the end, it's Paris and the pursuit of freedom that unites the people in Poirier's book. From their homes on the Right and Left Banks, they will have heard the bell that evening and felt the same rush of joy and hope. We experience it too, thanks to a detail like that. As Poirier hops across arrondissements, she manages to create the feeling we're peeking into the windows of her subjects, looking at buildings that still stand, at inhabitants long gone. ? Tracing the affiliations and intrigues of a group of writers, artists and philosophers who were shaped by the ordeals of World War II. LAUREN ELKIN'S most recent book is "Flanease: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 6, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review
In this breathless account of Parisian cultural life during and after WWII, Poirier introduces readers to a sprawling cast of philosophers, playwrights, actors, critics, painters, and others. The introduction describes the book as a collage of images and indeed this is so. Here are a raucous night on the town with Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre, the jubilant parade that welcomed Charles de Gaulle back to Paris after the city's liberation, restless afternoons with Richard Wright in his favorite café. Together, these images-in-words show how creative revolution was connected to radical politics and sexual liberation. Poirier has created prose that reads like a great movie montage, fast-paced, captivating, and purposeful. While it is disconcerting to read about a Jewish author's wartime disappearance in the same breath as an existentialist's effort to stay warm by inviting lovers into her bed, this makes precisely Poirier's point. During these years, terror coexisted with intimacy, heroism with passivity as writers wrote, and painters painted. As Sartre would say when asked how he and his compatriots survived the war, We lived. --Taft, Maggie Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
French journalist Poirier (Touché: A French Woman's Take on the English) attempts to capture life on the Left Bank during the desperate occupation years and tumultuous postwar period through the "kaleidoscope of destinies" of its leading intellectuals and artists. Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre play a central role in Poirier's narrative, drawing other writers and philosophers into their extensive professional network as well as their prolific, and sometimes messy, romantic entanglements. Poirier skillfully describes how, after the liberation of Paris, once-tight Resistance allies fragmented into cadres of Communists, right-leaning Gaullists, and adherents of Sartre's idealistic "Third Way." Amid the ongoing infighting, African-American artists such as Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Eartha Kitt, and Richard Wright were welcomed in Paris and performed freely there. Though the artists, musicians, and writers are the primary focus here, there's a quiet admiration for the men-including a Nazi bureaucrat-who went to great lengths to save major art works and literature from destruction or seizure prior to and during the occupation. The tight focus on high-profile figures and relative absence of working-class Parisians results in the work feeling distant and limited, almost decontextualized from daily struggles in the city. Nevertheless, Poirier humanizes the extraordinary men and women of the Left Bank, unraveling the complicated stories behind a breathtaking number of literary, philosophical, and artistic masterpieces in a singular, heartbreaking era. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Parisian-born journalist and now London-based author Poirier (Touche) gives readers an engrossing, spirited, and intimate look at intellectual life in Paris during a critical ten-year period: the dark years of war and occupation followed by the heady excitement after liberation. She tells the story of a creative generation of artists, poets, and writers all born in the period 1905-30, and all working, living, and interacting in Paris at the same time. She explores the intertwined lives of figures such as Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Pablo Picasso, and Americans such as Norman Mailer, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Theodore H. White. This influential group set new moral codes, questioned the traditional roles of women, and introduced new philosophies like existentialism and new concepts such as world citizenship. Living at a time that saw the emergence of Cold War tensions, these intellectuals challenged both Western capitalism and Soviet communism in their search for new politics. This book defies simple description; part collective biography, part cultural history, it aims to make the generation of intellectuals who shaped the Paris of the 1940s familiar to readers. VERDICT For Francophiles and informed readers interested in 20th-century cultural trends.-Marie M. Mullaney, Caldwell Coll., NJ © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A detailed chronicle of a decade alive with intellectual and political ferment.London-based journalist Poirier (Touch: A French Woman's Take on the English, 1997), a panel member of the BBC's weekly program Dateline London, offers a gossipy, well-informed cultural history of her native Paris, beginning in 1938, with Europe on the brink of war, and ending in 1949, with the Marshall Plan in effect to help the continent recover. Organizing the book chronologically, she follows the lives of artists, writers, musicians, publishers, and performersmostly French and Americandeftly creating "a collage of images, a kaleidoscope of destinies" from memoirs, histories, biographies, and the writers' own prolific work. While some of her cast of characters (Hemingway, Sylvia Beach, Adrienne Monnier) have minor roles, others are more prominent, notably Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus, along with their many lovers. The decade saw the publication of some of the most influential books of the 20th century, including Sartre's Being and Nothingness, which catapulted the philosopher to international fame; de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, which became a bible for feminism; Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, which revealed the author's bitter disillusionment with communism; and Samuel Beckett's iconoclastic play Waiting for Godot. These writers, and many others, shared their ideas in printin the journals Les Temps Modernes, founded by Sartre and de Beauvoir; and Combat, edited by Camusand also when they met at cafes, bars, restaurants, galleries, and theaters. Living in cheap hotel rooms or chilly apartments, they spent little time at home. Romantic liaisons were as passionate as debates over the future of Europe. "For Paris existentialists," Poirier writes, "friendship seemed as complicated as love. Fallings-out and reconciliations came in quick succession, politics and sex playing a central part." By 1948, Paris had become "the capital of sin and moral ambiguity," attracting hordes of Americans (Norman Mailer, Richard Wright, James Baldwin), some funded by the GI Bill.An animated, abundantly populated history of dramatic times. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
