Review by Booklist Review
Esteemed novelist White's marvelous little book inaugurates a new series entitled The Writer and the City, in which Bloomsbury USA will match accomplished writers to cities with which they are intimately familiar. If White's personal, loving, and saucy look at the city in which he, an American, was a fond resident for many years is an indication of things to come, the series will prove to be prime reading for travel lovers. White defines the flaneur of his title as an "aimless stroller who loses himself in the crowd, who has no destination and goes wherever caprice or curiosity direct his or her step." White assumes the role of flaneur to perambulate the narrow streets and grand boulevards of Paris, to gather impressions of people and places. He certainly sees the soul beneath the skin as he explores such topics as writers, royalty, and sex and what part each plays in the Parisian experience. He may be in love with Paris, but he is not blinded by it; in fact, he refers to the city as it exists today as a cultural backwater. --Brad Hooper
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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 LauzunÄhome to Baudelaire as a young manÄand a discussion of the poet's dandyism and struggle with syphilis. White includes personal memories and anecdotes of gay ParisÄin both senses of the phraseÄpast and present. "To be gay and cruise is perhaps an extension of the flneur's very essence, or at least its most successful application," even as the flneur'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. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
This is the first volume of a new series by Bloomsbury in which the world's novelists reveal the secrets of the city they know best. White (A Boy's Own Story), a gay writer who has lived in Paris for 16 years, has named this collection of essays after the aimless stroller celebrated by the poet Baudelaire, and Paris is certainly ideal for such explorations. White reflects on African Americans who took Paris by storm between the wars, French Jews, small and bizarre museums such as the Gustave Moreau Museum, relics from a royalist France, the gay scene, and more. A gifted writer who notices the little details missed by other guidebooks like the ivy-covered wall above the Seine that resembles the side of a galleon White is richly informed, and his evocative writing should appeal to both armchair travelers and visitors to Paris. [The series' future titles include Peter Carey's guide to Sydney and Ahdaf Soueif's guide to Cairo. Ed.] Ravi Shenoy, Naperville P.L., IL (c) Copyright 2010. 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
The renowned novelist (The Married Man, 2000, etc.) offers an intensely personal portrait of one of the worlds great metropolises. A big city, White quotes a reckless friend as saying, is a place where there are blacks, tall buildings and you can stay up all night. Paris fills the billand besides, the author adds on his own account, there you can buy heroin, hear preposterous theories that are closely held and furiously argued, and see some of the worlds most satisfying architecture. Above all else, White observes, Paris is a walkers citynot a village like Rome or a backwater like Zürich, but a city whose bounds can comfortably be traversed in a long evenings stroll. Himself an accomplished flâneur (stroller) in a city full of them, White offers notes on the grammar of the Parisian street, which is markedly unlike that of a street in, say, New York: Americans, he writes, consider the sidewalk an anonymous backstage space, whereas for the French it is the stage itself. Passing along arrondissements and îles and boulevards, White takes a sidelong view at French culture, with its marked tolerance for African-Americans but disdain for Africans, especially Arabs, and its astounding history of anti-Semitism; its pretensions to greatness and its frequent attainment of the same; and its seeming invulnerability to shock at any of the fleshs various gratifications. White, a pioneer of gay literature, spends portions of his book strolling through the homosexual demimonde of Paris, which is at once less self-conscious and more embattled than homosexual communities elsewhere. His book, however, should by no means be confined to the gay-lit shelves, for it provides sophisticated reflections on a city dear to so many travelers that has seen its day but retains its allure. Even the most sophisticated readers will learn much from these erudite perambulations.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
