The Flaneur
A Stroll through the Paradoxes of Paris
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Edmund White has just met you at a party and he's going to tell you about a friend. But his 'friend' is one of the greatest cities in the world, beloved by many and yet really known by only a few. And he is one of those few. -Alexander Chee
Edmund White's New York Times bestselling guided sojourn through the streets of Paris, with a new foreword by Alexander Chee.
Legendary paterfamilias of queer literature Edmund White lived in Paris for sixteen years, wandering the streets and avenues and quays of his favorite city. In The Flâneur he leads us on a walking tour of Paris' lush, sometimes prurient history, to parts of the city virtually unknown to visitors and indeed to many Parisians. This twenty-fifth anniversary edition celebrates the City of Light and the fearless wit and panache of one of its greatest devotees.
"A Paris you wouldn't otherwise see." -New York Times Book Review
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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 Lauzun--home to Baudelaire as a young man--and a discussion of the poet's dandyism and struggle with syphilis. White includes personal memories and anecdotes of gay Paris--in both senses of the phrase--past and present. "To be gay and cruise is perhaps an extension of the fl neur's very essence, or at least its most successful application," even as the fl neur'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.
