Speculating on how archeologists in the future may explain the Paris subway system, Lawrence Osborne reminds us that time can turn even mundane objects into mysteries. This is from "Paris Dreambook: An Unconventional Guide to the Splendor and Squalor of the City" (Vintage, paper). The Metro is above all a system of names, names which are a thousand times more secretive than the places they supposedly denote. Filles du Calvaire, Bel-Air, Crimee, Danube, Pyramides. . . . The Metro names will be remembered in the future as a schoolchild's mnemonic for the ancient history of Europe or as a crazy hieroglyphic inscription. . . . It will be concluded, of course, that the Metro was an idea, a religious idea, perhaps, or a pan-humanitarian one, but never a public transport system. . . . The Metro was an idea in the mind of 20th-century man and the astrological map around which his archaic spirituality revolved. In it he tried to express his yearnings for unity and harmony in the face of the chaos of his history, and if people wished to drive around in trains along the configurations appointed by this divine map of reality that only shows how deeply the people of this age felt their pan-humanistic rituals. Across the Ocean of Time.
From Jeanne Storck :
Fantastic, often breathless prose journey through a Paris that never makes the guidebooks. Osborne takes up where Aragon left off, bringing the Paris Peasant into the 90's. The author, from his apartment at 37, rue André Antoine in a seedier corner of Montmartre, sets out on explorations of the city. He invents a story for the old woman upstairs who collaborated with the Germans, explores the sex industry of the rue Saint Denis, follows the tags of Parisian graffitti artists, luxuriates in Paris' Turkish baths, attends an opening in an artist's studio near the Canal de l'Ourcq, meditates on the strange poetry in the names of Paris métro stops, visits the once Communist stronghold of the town of Ivry-sur-Seine, and all of this written in a style that is rich, often comic, resembling at times the more delirious passages of Céline.
And Ginger Danto, in Enertainment Weekly :
Lawrence Osborne's hyperbolic ode to the City of Light reads something like the transcript of a nightmare, complete with the kind of cryptic, macabre images that surface so readily in the subconscious. In his noble effort to avoid the cliches of expatriate narrative, Osborne presents Paris as a kind of European annex to the East Village. We navigate this urban demimonde via the author's overflowing prose, which reads as if it were inspired by the steady ingestion of gritty, bar- counter coffee from his favored section of Clichy. Indeed, except for portentous chapter headings, Osborne's writing flows like the opaque waters of the Seine, filled with all the grimy debris of daily life that both residents and tourists prefer not to acknowledge.
Library Journal :
Readers expecting the standard tourist cliches about the City of Light will be disappointed in this unusual travel guide. Using the literary device of an imaginary peasant, Osborne, explores a surreal, nightmarish Paris that few tourists ever encounter. In a sequence of dream-like essays, he offers his impressions of the city's bleak industrial suburbs, the red-light districts of Clichy and Saint-Denis, the exotic yet seedy Metro, and the Turkish baths hidden throughout the metropolis. This is not the Paris of the Eiffel Tower and the Champs-Elysees but the Paris of prostitutes, graffiti artists, African and Arab immigrants, and decrepit French collaborators who still dream of their Nazi lovers. Like Jean-Luc Godard's films, this book is both fascinating and irritating. An acquired taste for sophisticated readers, this is recommended for larger travel collections.
