Into A Paris Quartier: Reine Margot's Chapel and Other Haunts of St.-Germain [Hardcover]

Having lived in the Sixth at an earlier stage of my life and having walked it many times since, I was eager to read this account of my favorite arrondissement. Many of the places Johnson writes about I have walked past numerous times without appreciating the specific detail of which she writes. For her attention to this and the relationship of these places to France's rich history I am especially grateful. I wondered, however, why she (or her publishers)wanted to limit her to 200 pages on such an intriguing topic. Perhaps it was to see if a novelist could write a riveting account on a subject matter that is not every one's cup of tea. It may have been a good idea.

While the initial idea of bringing the reader's focus to a familiar personage in literature, d'Artagnan of Dumas' The Three Musketeers, was a good one, his further appearances become unnecessary and even, at times, puzzling. I felt it was a tool overused.

As envious as I may be of Ms. Johnson's lifestyle and location on rue Bonaparte (my favorite hotel is at No. 36), I found her periodic references to American foreign and domestic policy (Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, "They impeached him for that?") distinctly off-topic, distracting and thoroughly out of place. Her observation that perhaps the violence of life in America was a result of the youth of our nation caused me to ask myself, "Where has she been all this time?". Our history of two hundred or so years pales by comparison with France's (or Europe's) two thousand or more. Now that she has broadened her literary style to include novelist and essayist, perhaps we can look forward to her emergence as an historian or political commentator as well.

While I did enjoy the book overall, primarily because of my affinity for the topic, I feel it would be difficult to recommend it to people that don't already know the area. For me, the narrative lacks connection. It just didn't reach out and compel me to keep reading and I think that was because of the jumping about from period to present and back. I didn't sense the thread of continuity that one would expect from a successful novelist.

Because I am staying in the 6th as I always do, I bought this book before my trip. As I slog my way through, I become more and more convinced that this book should never have been. The musings of an American, albeit a successfully published one, about her Parisian neighborhood and its history turn out to be insufficient to constitute a good book.

Perhaps the biggest problem is that it is written so much from the author's own point of view, that of a self-described "housewife and author," seemingly without a view to create a good story, or a good guidebook, or a good history, or good character sketches for her readers. I didn't particularly care to know, for example, that she read "The Three Musketeers" during "what the doctors say in retrospect" was probably polio, "with a raging fever, and a headache so horrible I can almost still feel it"; that when the author and her husband "remodeled our 1906 house on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, the workmen unearthed old whiskey bottles, the bones of two cats, and a shoe"; that while working on her novel "L'Affaire," she "gained a couple of pounds, too, from each day buying a chocolate 'rocher' at the Tabac des Beaux-Arts at my corner to nibble surreptitiously instead of going home to lunch"; or that "I feel a kind of affinity with Diane de Poitiers [mistress of Henri II] on account of having her name"; or that "it was evidently some Francophilia on the part of my parents that made them think of this name, and spell it Diane in the French way"; or that her parents had also considered naming her Charlotte, Margot or Anne.

So whatever amount of scantily-researched history is presented in the book is to me obscured by such dull facts as these, with which most of us choose only to bore our closest friends. That the author presents the word of various neighbors about the history concerning certain buildings does little to convince me that I should view this as having any serious historical merit.

Nor can it be viewed in the same vein as, say, Peter Mayle's books which, like them or not, present charming sketches of locals, since few of the author's friends, acquaintances or neighbors are brought out as personalities in any significant way.

I'm leaving the book in my hotel, and if you stay here too, I advise you not to waste your time picking it up!

After reading the previous reviews upon completing the book, it occurs to me first off that National Geographic should probably be much more informative about the parameters and aims of its Directions series, and it should do so right on the jacket or book cover. Doing so would serve both the reader and the Directions authors well. Those who have given the book the harshest reviews probably would have self-selected themselves out of its reading pool if they had understood that the book consists of a long personal essay about the topic described in the title. It is neither guidebook, nor history book, nor a book of character sketches, nor a story narrative, nor any other such thing; nor, apparently, was it ever intended to be any of these things. However, the readers who have expressed their displeasure with the book obviously expected the book to be one or more of those things, as their reviews make clear in their enumeration of the book's perceived flaws. It would seem their expectations rendered those readers incapable of stepping back to understand what the publisher and author clearly intended the book to be.

Simply put, complaining that a personal essay is "so much from the author's own point of view" is pretty silly; of course it is - that's exactly what a personal essay is supposed to be! Personal essays are at least as much about the person writing the essay as they are about the stated topic of the essay. The reader can and should expect to read about the author and what the author thinks. Beyond that, personal essays can be linear (if the person writing the essay is a linear thinker); they can just as easily be rambling, diffuse, tangential, etc. They can be interesting or not. And they can be anything at all in between. One previous reviewer says it nicely: The book is indeed, first and foremost, a conversation (albeit a one-sided one) with the author before it is anything else. Some personal essayists, like people generally, are better conversationalists than others.

So, while there is no point in reading the book unless one has an interest in the area of Paris known as Saint-Germain-des-Prés, that's the easy part. The real issues are, first, whether the prospective reader cares to read personal essays at all, and second, whether he or she will like Johnson's particular style and substance as a personal essayist. As to the first issue, if you don't like the personal essay, don't bother to read the book, no matter how much you are interested in Saint-Germain. Just don't do it. You'll be a much happier person that way.

As to the remaining issue, for those who do like the personal essay. As a "conversationalist" in writing, I found Johnson to have some annoying traits, some of which correspond to some of the criticisms voiced in the previous reviews. First, every time she wonders about some historically verifiable fact or event (and she does so often enough), I found myself saying, "Well, why didn't you just go look it up instead of just telling me you wonder about it?" Second, while, on principal, I have no problem with her including her thoughts on current events and her hypotheses on historical causes of present-day effects, I simply find the points she tries to make to be vague, off-hand, superficial, and not that interesting. Third, she repeats herself from time to time (her editors should have taken care of this). And fourth, there's at least one discrepancy in the book (regarding the year Oscar Wilde died) that should have been caught and conformed or explained (again, her editors should have been on top of this).

On the whole, however, I found Johnson to be pretty good company for a 200-page quick read. Her tone is accessible. I think she can be excused for a bit of what could be taken as name dropping (especially given that she usually leaves out the names). The substance of the book is personal enough that I could imagine her in her apartment at the kitchen window overlooking Queen Margot's chapel, or strolling through the quartier, or surreptitiously eating chocolate while pretending to work in the library, or - and here she gives you a very good sense of things (with telling detail, like the fact that her auburn-haired voisine does not acknowledge her outside of their courtyard) -- trying to comprehend the intricacies of being a resident outsider to the French life going on around her, but not so personal as to force me to develop a stake in her concerns or her interests (in other words, a light read). Unless you've spent a lot of very studious free time in Saint-Germain, you will find she provides plenty of information to digest about Saint-Germain-des-Prés, related but less well known parts of French history, and even current language usage (maybe I'm way behind the times, but just learning that the term "concierge" is no longer considered PC was of interest to me). And even if you already know everything she has to tell you factually, reviewing it as an armchair traveler will give you the enjoyable sense that you are visiting the area once again and will prompt you to bask in your own good memories. I referred to the map often to understand exactly what and where she was talking about and to figure out if I'd walked that route myself when I've stayed in or visited the quartier. (All of us who have enjoyed staying at the Hôtel Saint Germain des Prés at 36, rue Bonaparte, must constitute a de facto alumni club of some sort.) And Johnson mentions a couple of books on Paris that I wasn't aware of and that I've now added to my reading list.

On the whole, I found the book worth the reading time (check it out from the library if you don't think it will be worth the price). You may find it worth the time as well, as long as you understand what to expect.

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