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PARIS LIFTS the soul, and then exasperates. It expresses reason in its orderly layout and tugs at the heart. The City of Lights mixes magic with the mundane: it is a place of bridges in the moonlight and harshly lit RER underground stations; zinc rooftops and brutalist tower blocks; fine dining and fury on the streets. As the host of the Olympic games, which begin on July 26th, Paris is more than ever a showcase, set to dazzle and delight the world. But the French capital’s often-hidden complexity and paradoxes are also part of its richness. This selection of non-fiction books—most of them by outsiders who have adopted Paris in some way—convey the character of a city that is both familiar and mysterious.
Agnès Poirier’s chronicle of the city’s modish past is a stylish feast. It reveals the small literary world of turtleneck-wearing philosophers, who swapped theory, cigarettes and bed mates on the rive gauche—the left bank—of the Seine in wartime and post-war Paris. Centred on a tiny quarter, the account brings to life the anti-bourgeois and radical-thinking circle that formed around Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and the Café de Flore on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. The café was the group’s “university”, and the centre of avant-garde intellectual life. De Beauvoir rented an unheated room on the rue de Seine, a step away; Sartre on the rue Bonaparte, just around the corner. Besides relating telling details—de Beauvoir used the Flore as her letter box—the book emphasises the cramped geography of public intellectual life at the time, which in some respects persists to this day. Read our full review of “Left Bank” from 2018.
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