Liam Callanan's Blog - Posts Tagged "parisbythebook"

Apologies for being away from Goodreads for a spell; I'm glad to be back. I'm counting down to the publication of my new novel, Paris by the Book (April 2018, from Dutton) by tweeting a new Paris book rec each Tuesday. Many, but not all, went into the mix of research that fed my new book.

I've been doing this for a few weeks now with the hashtag #parisbythebook and as fun as it's been, it's also been maddening to try to collapse my thoughts about each book into 140 characters. So I'm glad to have slightly more space than that to celebrate my rec this week, Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare & Company. It's a lovely, short memoir, as humble and self-effacing as its author.

Shakespeare & Co., of course, is the famed English language Paris bookstore -- or rather, it was the famed English language bookstore in Paris until the Nazis shut it down in World War II (due to an officer's annoyance that Beach wouldn't sell him her last copy of Finnegans Wake.

Beach's connection to Joyce began almost 20 years earlier, when she published his Ulysses, a mammoth challenge made even more so by Joyce's incessant editing, even after the book had been typeset. (It's something I've been thinking about a lot as I review my new novel's typeset pages -- I've been warned I can change no more than 10 percent at this stage!)

Shakespeare & Company does live on in Paris today, but in a new iteration in a new location, launched by famed bookseller George Whitman, who renamed his store --and daughter -- to honor Sylvia and her beacon on the Left Bank. When people ask why independent bookstores matter, I think of a lot of a stores and people and places -- but I think first of all of Shakespeare & Company and Sylvia Beach. It's a helpful reminder that of all the things a bookseller has to be -- patient, smart, perceptive, well-read -- one of the little mentioned attributes has been historically the most important: brave.

Visit Shakespeare & Company today just south of Notre Dame on the rue de la Bûcherie, or in the pages of their beautiful book.

PS And the birthday wishes are for Paul Muldoon, whose birthday is reportedly today. Some talented students of mine once animated his poem, "Hedgehog" (and then bought one): http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/poetryeverywh...

When I recently went looking in search of the publication date of Thad Carhart's book,
THE PIANO SHOP ON THE LEFT BANK,
I couldn't believe it came out fully 15 years ago.
It feels like everyone was talking about that book just last year

And maybe they were -- it has wonderful staying power. Carhart -- once Apple's PR person in Europe -- writes a wonderfully engaging memoir about the tiny piano shop he discovers, its remarkable proprietor, Luc, and, of course, the piano he comes to own (along with an unforgettable account of its travel up multiple flights of stairs with nothing more than a pair of hands and a deliveryman's broad back).

One thing that's always struck me about Paris is how it supports this entire ecosystem of tiny, specialized stores. Or maybe it doesn't support them: I always wonder how this tiny shop of puzzles, or that one of antique sports equipment, makes it. Who are the buyers?

Carhart, in this case. It's a wonderful story, and it was wonderful news when I saw that he was touring with a new memoir, Finding Fontainebleau: An American Boy in France. An account of his growing up (for a spell) in Paris as the son of a NATO officer, it's a book I'm eager to read -- and more to the point, buy, from as small a shop as I can find.

James Baldwin's wide-ranging essay collection NOTES OF A NATIVE SON is not specifically a Paris book -- not, anyway, in the sense that his novel GIOVANNI'S ROOM is. And given that the novel even has a scene in a bookshop, it's all the more relevant to my year-long #parisbythebook project -- but that's for another day).

But "Equal in Paris," which has few equals as an essay, is the urgent read this week. In truth, Baldwin is always an urgent read. In his essays in particular, his prose is so surefooted, so sharp, it's literally breathtaking for me -- as in, when I reach a paragraph like this*, and its devastating final sentence, it's a moment or two before I remember: breathe. And when I do, I remember what Baldwin's still telling us, decades on: we have an awful lot of work still to do.

*[As context: Baldwin has been arrested and put on trial because an acquaintance stole a hotel bedsheet, or drap de lit. Better context, just read the original essay.] "The story of the drap de lit, finally told, caused great merriment in the courtroom, whereupon my friend decided that the French were 'great.' I was chilled by their merriment, even though it was meant to warm me. It could only remind me of the laughter I had often heard at home, laughter which I had sometimes deliberately elicited. This laughter is the laughter of those who consider themselves to be at a safe remove from all the wretched, for whom the pain of the living is not real. I had heard it so often in my native land that I had resolved to find a place where I would never hear it any more. In some deep, black, stony, and liberating way, my life, in my own eyes, began during that first year in Paris, when it was borne in on me that this laughter is universal and never can be stilled."

I've visited Paris often, but I've never been so fortunate as to live there, so while researching my forthcoming novel (Paris by the Book), I read the memoirs of as many people as I could. Few left more of an indelible mark than Kate Betts's MY PARIS DREAM .

Though it's a beautiful cover--and title--what remains with me from this book is how very real, and how very not dreamlike its Paris is. We're not 11 pages in before Betts mentions the bombings that terrorized the city in the late 1980s (just before she's due to arrive, her degree from Princeton, where she was a French major, firmly in hand).

Paris is beautiful, and Betts captures that beauty, particularly its world of fashion and design (as would only befit someone who later came to edit Harper's Bazaar). But Betts is also unflinching in depicting the more difficult aspects of living in Paris (and navigating a tough workplace environments -- her clear-eyed account of working with fashion journalism legend John Fairchild is bracing: "You wicked witch," he tells her when she announces she's departing his employ for Vogue).

But hand this book to anyone in Betts's position today--some young French major, freshly graduated, looking longingly to Paris--and I've no doubt they'd still want to get on the next plane, so entranced with the story of Betts's journey, and her Paris, even though its beset with terrorism once more.

We used to live in DC, and whenever the new political tell-all book came out--and I'm guessing we're about to enter a new golden era of these--the joke was that DC types always read such books starting with the index. Who's mentioned? Who's absent?

My edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas doesn't have an index of names, but if it did, it might run as long as the book itself: Picasso, Hemingway, Matisse, Cezanne, Apollinaire -- to say nothing of Hélène, Gertrude Stein's cook, who did not care for Matisse at all:

Hélène had her opinions, she did not for instance like Matisse. She said a frenchman should not stay unexpectedly to a meal particularly if he asked the servant beforehand what there was for dinner. She said foreigners had a perfect right to do these thing but not a frenchman and Matisse had once done it. So when Miss Stein said to her, Monsieur Matisse is staying for dinner this evening, she would say, in that case I will not make an omelette but fry the eggs. It takes the same number of effs and the same amount of butter but it shows less respect, and he will understand.

The sly wink of the book's cover--that this autobiography is not, in fact, written by Alice Toklas but her longtime partner Gertrude Stein, still causes me to do a double take, even though I've long come around to the opinion that this really IS an autobiography, if channeled through another writer. Every so often Stein's voice and thoughts does break into the text--and I think Alice would have been apt and able to punctuate all the words that needed punctuating--but otherwise, one of the marvels of this text, Stein's most readable, is that Toklas really does come alive on the page, voice and all.

On the plaque outside their famed salon at 27, rue de Fleurus, in the 6th, Stein's name is several sizes larger than the rest of the text. But even to the speediest person walking by--because what painters and poets still ring the bell here?--Alice's name, embedded in the brief caption beneath Stein, still shines through--much as she does in this surprisingly giddy book.

When people ask me to recommend a general history of Paris--

Actually, people never ask me that, not that way. But they do often ask for a Paris 101 guide--not a travel guide, but a book that will introduce them to Paris past and present. The book I always recommend first is Graham Robb's THE PARISIANS.

It's not a comprehensive history of Paris, and that's just fine (there's too much blood in a comprehensive history of Paris). It is, rather, an idiosyncratic tour through time that alights in a series of interesting places and periods throughout the city and then, through Robb's vivid, smart prose, brings a parade of Parisians to life. It's a marvelous book. What was it like visiting Haussmann's office when he was in the midst of tearing Paris apart in the 19th century? What's it like to cycle from the center of Paris today out through the incredibly diverse banlieues? Read Robb and find out: two completely different journeys in this completely different book. Whenever I go to Paris, I'm never entirely sure where I'll end up. But I know that this book is always a good place to start.

Some years ago--long enough that iPhones were not a thing but PDAs (personal digital assistants) were--I left a Palm Pilot in a cab in New York. I'd left it because I'd just giddily emerged from the first publisher's meeting about my first novel. I don't know where the expression cloud 9 comes from, but if there is such a thing, I was on cloud 10.

And then I realized I'd lost my PalmPilot. It wasn't quite the disaster of losing one's smartphone today, but it did have a lot of information on it, it was expensive, and I felt like an idiot.

The next day, I got an email from my editor. Someone had found my Palm Pilot in the cab. They'd looked at my calendar (again, this was so far back in time I didn't even have a passcode lock on the device), saw that I'd had a meeting and whom I had it with, looked up the phone number, made the call -- I had it back the next day. I chalked it up to the magic of that whole first-book experience.

Antoine Laurain's THE RED NOTEBOOK is filled with similar magic (albeit much more charmingly told). Bookseller Laurent finds a lost purse, and gradually pores through it to piece together a picture of whose bag it was -- and how he might get it back to her.

The secret here is a light touch. Laurain never overplays his hand; at times, the book almost plays like a fairy tale. But not a kids' tale -- the stakes are real, and so is his Paris. It's a challenge to capture the city in a way that's both charming and serious, and Laurain does it deftly here.

With THE PORTRAIT just out, I can't wait to read on...The Portrait

My local bookstore, Boswell Books, has the best-curated bargain table in the country. (Argue if you want--you should, actually. I side with Calvin Trillin's dictum that the definition of a wimp is someone who doesn't believe his hometown makes the best hamburger in America. Swap bookstore for burger, and that's me.) It may just be that they've come to know 1) my taste and 2) my weakness, which is to always buy something.

Today, it was nothing about burgers, but rather, MEET PARIS OYSTER. This is a lighter book than others on my Paris bookshelf in several respects -- it's just 140-odd pages in a small trim size -- by the author of FRENCH WOMEN DON'T GET FAT. The prose is informal...and contains many, many ellipses of the handwaving variety: "And then there are the oysters...zee best."

Still the book itself is beautifully done, and the story -- of Paris' passion for oysters and the passion of the author, Mireille Guiliano, for one oyster bar, or huîterie, in particular, Huîterie Régis. Located at 3 rue de Montfaucon in the 6th, opposite (in every way) a Chipotle on the rue de Montfaucon, the restaurant is tiny, and to hear Guiliano describe it, exquisite.

There's oyster history here, some recipes, rumors, and a taxonomy of taste. As is the case with oysters themselves, if you're a fan, this will go down very easily.

Catherine Sanderson's Petite Anglaise grew out of an anonymous blog she maintained about her life in Paris. It was fun and sexy and humorously self-effacing: she was an enormously good sport through many misadventures, dating and otherwise. But her employers proved not to be good sports; once she was revealed to the author of the blog, she was fired. Though the French courts later sided with her, it can't have been a pleasant outcome for a woman who'd dreamed of living in Paris since she was a little girl.

But one outcome was pleasant--this lovely, unassuming memoir. It gets compared to a real-life Bridget Jones Diary, and while I can see why, it's also more fun -- and more dark -- that Ms. Jones. Sanderson's various decisions in love, in life, have real costs, and some of them prove substantial.

One of her loves--arguably her chief love--that endures is Paris. Hers is smart and chic but also flinty and real.

Which is much like the author herself. Though she no longer blogs, you can peek in on the old one at https://petiteanglaise.com/, and you'll find that after this memoir and a novel--and two kids--she decided to head back to an office job. It may not be the kind of happy ending readers cheer for--but it's also a very honest one. And who's to say more books won't someday arrive? I hope they do.

The Little Bookroom Guide to Paris with Children: Play, Eat, Shop, Stay

The publishers of PARIS WITH CHILDREN didn't add a question mark to the title, though they easily could have: any parent who's ever wondered about bringing children there has wondered, really?

My wife and I have had the great good fortune to do so several times, and my answer is: yes. It's also the answer of this guidebook-but-that's-too-belittling-a-name-for-it book. Thoughtful, thorough, and above all, well-written, it's a book that doesn't talk down to parents--or children. It's also incredibly smart. Those first jet-lagged days in Paris? Spend some time in the museums--but in the evenings (many have special evening hours). Your children's circadian rhythms will leave them livelier at that hour and the museums themselves will be comparatively empty.

I confess that our own first trip to Paris we did not have this book--we, um, used children's books instead, an experiment that led to an article and later a book (see liamcallanan.com). But we've used this book ever since, even now that our children are grown. (Because even grown children need to know where to find a bathroom in any given arondissement tout suite.)

It's also beautifully illustrated and perfectly packable.

I know: I sound giddy about this book, and that's hard to square with the more serious tone of some of the other posts in my series here. But I believe in a Paris that mixes fun and serious--and I believe in exposing kids to that kind of Paris too, as early as you're able.