Impossible City
Paris in the Twenty-First Century
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2024
A Waterstones Best History Book of 2024 Pick
'Kuper is a shrewd observer [in] this entertaining mix of memoir and anthropology' The Sunday Times
From the bestselling author of Chums comes an explorer's tale of a naïf getting to understand a complex, glittering, beautiful and often cruel city.
Simon Kuper has experienced Paris both as a human being and as a journalist. He has grown middle-aged there, eaten the croissants, taken his children to countless football matches on freezing Saturday mornings in the city's notorious banlieues, and in 2015 lived through two terrorist attacks on his family's neighbourhood. Over two decades of becoming something of a cantankerous Parisian himself, Kuper has watched the city change.
This century, Paris has globalised, gentrified, and been shocked into realising its role as the crucible of civilisational conflict. Sometimes it's a multicultural paradise, and sometimes it isn't. This decade, Parisians have lived through a sequence of shocks: terrorist attacks, record floods and heatwaves, the burning of Notre Dame, the storming of the city by gilets jaunes, and the pandemic. Now, as the Olympics come to town, France is busy executing the 'Grand Paris' project: the most serious attempt yet to knit together the bejewelled city with its neglected suburbs.
This is a captivating memoir of today's Paris without the clichés.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Financial Times reporter Kuper (Chums), a self-professed "naive explorer" who moved to Paris 20-odd years ago, serves up an eclectic survey of the city's peculiarities and charms. Covering traditionally "French" topics, the author comments on Parisian fashion, flirtations, and such quotidian complaints as the city's bad traffic ("Parisians... should never have been allowed to drive"). On a more serious note, he interrogates the dark side of France's reputation for sexual permissiveness, recalling how the #MeToo movement gained traction in 2017 and 2018 but was opposed by some older women who pined for the "good old days" of so-called "sexual freedom." Elsewhere, he delves into a spate of antisemitic attacks in the 2000s and 2010s, though by and large praises the city's multiculturalism. In self-aware prose shot through with droll wit, Kuper renders Paris's triumphs and challenges alongside more mundane yet no less revealing moments (when his wife asks his building manager if his kids can play in the courtyard on weekends, she's told, "You are an American, so you do not understand, but what you want is unthinkable"—because, the author surmises, Paris is "for adults"). It's a loving and illuminating ode to the City of Light.
