Erik Larson's Blog - Posts Tagged "paris"

As some of you may know, my wife and I have temporarily moved to Paris, where I'll be conducting highly secret research for my next project, and where she'll be working on a writing project of her own while on sabbatical. I brought with me Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, which I first read in college, and loved. It's not his best book, surely, but it's richly evocative of a very compelling time. Truly, it's the literary equivalent of Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris.

I'm reading it in small bursts, rationing it, because it's such a delight to be here in Hemingway's city, reading about his walks and encounters. We're a block east of his beloved Jardin du Luxembourg, where my wife and I walk at least once every day. Many of the places he loved are still here, remarkably. Tomorrow, for example, I plan to stroll past Gertrude Stein's building, at 27 rue de Fleurus, west of the park in the swanky Sixth Arrondisement. The other day we stopped at Shakespeare and Company, and browsed the shelves along with numerous hipsters and their French equivalent, bobo's.

Anyone have any suggestions for another highly evocative Paris book, for when I'm done with this? (BTW, I'm also reading the Paris stories of Mavis Gallant.)

A couple of weeks ago, while browsing the shelves of a used-book store here in Paris, I came across a detective novel by Andrea Camilleri, called The Snack Thief. One of my daughters, a State Department expert on international crime who is fluent in Italian and very good at Italian cooking, was with me, and recommended it. (She, of course, had read it in Italian.) I loved it, and totally fell for its protagonist, Inspector Montalbano, a police detective in a coastal town in Italy. He's smart, volatile, and funny, but above all, he loves and honors masterful Italian cooking. An encounter with fried mullet can put him in a coma of pleasure for an entire day. My kind of guy. I found myself laughing out loud.

Now, I've become a Camilleri junkie. I'm midway through one of his better known Montalbano novels, The Terracotta Dog. I won't talk about the plot, because I don't want to give anything away, but suffice it to say, everything that I loved about The Snack Thief is here, multiplied by two.

I haven't enjoyed a fictional character this much in a long time, and I think it's because I feel an especially powerful resonance with his obsession with excellent food. I'm not an expert chef, though I do love to cook, and when I travel, I travel for food. I'm not ashamed to admit it.

Here in Paris, where we're living for six months so that I can more efficiently research my next book, I spend most of the day looking forward to lunch and dinner and scouring various sources, from Zagat to Le Fooding, to determine where to get the best meal for an appropriate price. Everything else--museums, tours, parks--is foreplay, and a means of keeping my weight down. So far so good: I can still wear jeans with a 32 waist. I can remember meals and restaurants from decades ago, including, by the way, my first-ever encounter with fresh salmon (1981) at a San Francisco place called the Hayes Street Grill.

So I proclaim it here: Io sono Montalbano! (I AM Montalbano.)

E.