Parisians [Paperback]

Graham Robb is a modern-day flaneur. The concept of the flaneur was popularized by Charles Baudelaire who defined it as someone who strolls about the city in order to observe it and experience it, someone who might also be an esthete and a dandy. This book contains 19 anecdotes that are meditations on historical characters and the geographical locations with which they are associated. There is of course no better city to be a flaneur than Paris, a city where every street and building has a story to tell.

Robb has a novelist's imagination and eye for detail. The first episode is set in the late 18th century and concerns a young man coming to Paris from Corsica. The lad makes his way to the Palais Royal to experience to the pleasures of the flesh for the first time. The young man we find out later on was Napoleon. Apparently the residence Cardinal Richelieu and French Royalty had become the place to go for nightlife in Paris.

Before Baron Haussmann cleared whole neighborhoods to lay out wide boulevards along straight lines, Paris was a network of convoluted, narrow streets. It was a city without maps. Robb tells the story of Marie-Antoinette as she was fleeing the mobs during the French Revolution. She was trying to get to Vincennes but accidentally gave her coachman the wrong directions and ended up in the hands of her enemies.

One of the most interesting and little-known figures brought to light by this study is Charles Axel Guillaumot. In the late 1700s the streets of the Left Bank were starting to cave in as a result of many years of quarrying below the city. Guillaumot, who was an architect and surveyor, decided to reinforce the caverns underneath the city and use them as a place to bury the dead, thus creating the infamous Catacombs.

There is also a chapter on Hitler's one and only whirlwind tour of the city with his sculptor Arno Breker and architect Albert Speer. The tour lasted only two and half hours but apparently Hilter beside himself after absorbing the splendor of the city. It reminds us that he was an artist before he became a politician.

Every chapter is beautifully written and full of surprises. One can imagine that there are many more stories such as these. They seem arbitrary but nevertheless insightful. Robb has repeated the succuss of an earlier work, The Discovery of France: A Historical Geographyin which he does for rural France what he does for Paris in this volume.

If you have a passion for Paris, or France in general the Parisians is likely worth the read. There is much to enjoy about Robb's book. Bits about the construction of the catacombs were fascinating, Marie Antoinette getting lost for half a night just feet outside the Royal Palace added to the legend of her general cluelessness, the story of Emile Zola's wife was heartbreaking, and there's a bit about Alchemy's influence on chemistry, physics and one particular Alchemist's knowledge of the nuclear energy well before it was harnessed for the atom bomb.

But there were many times I found myself frustrated with the book. Robb clearly knows his Parisian history but chooses to play coy often not telling us who the chapters are about until the last few paragraphs. Moreover he writes as if the reader should know many of facts and dates of Parisian history. My Parisian history is rather weak (why I was interested in the book) so I muddled through as best I could. In one chapter the two unnamed major players of the story were both men and I found myself realizing that the "he" Robb had started to tell me about, was no longer the "he" I was now reading about--you see the difficulty? It's not like this is Faulkner or Joyce we're tackling here. I don't feel it's too much to ask to feel secure in repeating a fact or two of history after I'm finished reading some historical non-fiction.

Other nit-picking:

*Robb makes much of the fact that there wasn't a decent map of Paris up until a certain point but couldn't a *readable* one have been included in the book for reference? (There is a quaint little map included at the beginning of the book--it just wasn't terribly helpful)

*There is an entire section talking about Marville's photographs of the city which sounded lovely but the photos reproduced in the book were so small as to make all the details Robb discusses nearly impossible to see. [Three years later I've finally realized this is exactly the sort of thing Google images was invented for].

I admit to not finishing the last 100 or so pages of this book. With two other books on my shelf and other Amazon reviewers claiming things got less cogent as the book went into it's final pages I felt like I'd done what I could with The Parisians.

On the other hand, the Parisians has piqued my curiosity about reading some classic French literature and looking more into the lives of some of the character in this book. I'd say all and all I've come out better for having spent time with it.

I wanted so much to like this book. The format and concept of the book are brilliant: short vignettes describing the characters (some well known, others not) that have made Paris what it is today.

However, the execution is terribly lacking. Mr. Robb is, no doubt, a gifted writer. One gets the sense, however, that he's trying TOO hard here. While a couple of the stories are somewhat interesting, the bulk of them are barely readable. The author gets so caught up in extraneous metaphors, flowery language, and coy pronouns that it becomes difficult to determine if two consecutive paragraphs even belong in the same story. More often than not I found myself finishing a story only to wonder "what the hell was that even about?"

The book is 436 pages long. I'm finally giving up on page 400. Had this book been one continuous story instead of short vignettes, I probably would have given up a lot sooner. But each vignette is only 15-25 pages long. Every time I finished a story, I found myself desperately hoping that the next one would knock my socks off and would make this painstaking effort worthwhile. And, again, more often than not, I found myself disappointed and frustrated.

I rarely take the time to post a review on Amazon but that's how frustrating and disappointing "Parisians" was. I am giving it two stars because the _idea_ was excellent. Unfortunately, the author and his writing did not live up to it.