Review by New York Times Review
SO MANY BOOKS about Paris are concerned with the rich, matronly capital city, but this one, originally published in French in 1952, is about the postwar Paris of the poor and their not always successful efforts to eat, drink and stay warm. It's a picture of a bohemian Paris that has now all but disappeared, though I say "bohemian" advisedly since Jean-Paul Clébert (who was born in 1926 and died in 2011) had a horror of the picturesque. A middle-class boy, Clébert ran away from a Jesuit boarding school at 17 and joined the French Resistance. After World War II, he decided to live rough, scribbling notes about the things he observed and stuffing them away for safekeeping. Then one day he sat down to write. This method produced a remarkably vivid, detailed book that seems to have been composed with no method, its narrative marked by a chaotic and cheerfully self-acknowledged spontaneity. Clébert also admits that if he first took to the streets in order to get laid, he remembers the cityscape better than the young women: "gas works, apartment buildings fit for troglodytes, unlikely skyscrapers silhouetted against the void, lowlife hotels, bals musettes, empty lots, labyrinthine streets, city gates, suburban bus stops, overhead metro lines, traffic tunnels." Characteristically, Clébert's favorite locale was the "Zone," where the ring road surrounding Paris now stands. Once the site of fortifications protecting the city, it became a no man's land after they were torn down. In this place where building was officially forbidden, the desperate and defiant made their home: "a community of ragmen, scrap-metal dealers, chair bottomers, panhandlers, raisers of poultry or of white mice, ensconced in a patchwork of uncultivated plots and shacks separated by hedges of folding bedsteads (remarkable by their number), dwellings constructed more of wood than of concrete, more of boards and sheet metal than of brick, structures whose purpose is not immediately apparent: cabin, toolshed, rabbit hutch, outhouse?" In my 16 years of living in the city, I caught glimpses of this old Paris. My street, the Rue des Lombards, was the street of old prostitutes, for whom there was a vigorous market of young male clients. I made some sketchy friends: petty thieves, dishwashers, carnival workers, rent boys. They could scarcely understand my Alliance Française French; each was proud to be a titi parisien and to speak with the accent of Belleville and Ménilmontant. Some of them used verlan, in which the first and last syllables are reversed ("bizarre," for example, becoming "zarbi"), or employed their own particular argot. I remember an old taxi driver telling me that in the 1930s he'd been a sharp, competitive dresser and had worn golf trousers, even though he couldn't play golf. This was the world of Céline, occasionally of Jean Genet - and of Jean Vigo's "L'Atalante," a film about life on a barge on the Seine. Clébert writes of a place where you bought three Gauloises out of a pack, where beggars who'd been lucky stood their mates for a round and sang old ballads, then gathered a few butts "by way of provision for the night." He visits the huts along the Seine where the corpses of suicides are fished out of the river. And he spends time in pitiful flea markets like the ones I saw in Montreuil in the '90s, where vendors sell "unmatched pairs of boots, ragged jackets and trousers, garments at a hundred francs, surplus pieces of leather, printed papers much stained but still readable ... bundles of postcards, bits of scrap metal, bags of bent and rusty nails, broken or defective concierge's knickknacks, and so on. Unmatched, stained, bent, rusty, broken, defective - just like these poor devils, their faces plaster masks of no-more-hope." Clébert is a master of the long, cascading list-sentence, trippingly rendered into English by Donald Nicholson-Smith. His descriptions are mirrored by (not illustrated by) the bleak photographs of Patrice Molinard. A CONNOISSEUR OF chaos, Clébert is the poet of the lumpen-proletariat and of a forgotten city: "Between the two bridges, mainly on the Left Bank, one's sense of smell is overstimulated by a succession of odors, as follows (read slowly): cheese, very violent, then, by turns, gas welding, fresh periwinkles and new rust." He has a very precise sensorium. Luc Sante, who has written the informative introduction to this volume, has recently offered his own look at the city, "The Other Paris," a brilliantly researched narrative that touches on everything from the Paris Commune to dime novels. Here he tells us that Clébert's book was inspired by Henry Miller and Blaise Cendrars. I recently reread Miller's "Quiet Days in Clichy" and Cendrars's "The Astonished Man," which are both more involving than "Paris Vagabond" because they are built around developed characters. Cendrars, for example, gives us Mick's woman, who likes to tease their dog like a magpie: "Like that comic and carefree bird, she adored romping with Volga and playing pranks to bewilder her." In similar fashion, Miller gives us his destitute flatmate, the volatile Carl, who joins him in an endless search for women and drink. Clébert isn't self-concealing, exactly, but he seems determined not to be egotistical, even though memoirs feed off the ego. And he seems to have a fault frequently found in memoirists: the fear that readers will find his milieu more interesting than he is. EDMUND WHITE'S most recent novel is "Our Young Man." He teaches creative writing at Princeton.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 3, 2016]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this genre-less book (originally published in French in 1952), Clébert insists "this is not supposed to be a Baedeker or some tourist guide." Yet on one level, it is a catalogue of a geographic Paris, of "streets, sidewalks, houses, lampposts, shady nooks, trees, urinals." From Boulevard Poniatowski to the Saint-Ouen flea market, from the red light district of Rue Quincampoix to Place de la Contrescarpe, "the most beautiful little plaza in Paris," Clébert enumerates more streets and landmarks than a Lonely Planet travel book. Yet, on another level, this is a memoir: "I first discovered Paris at the age of seventeen, and lost my virginity as I did so," Clébert writes, and the book takes us from his first job measuring rooms with a folding ruler to his stint as a vagabond, warming his hands by a fire on Rue Sauvage, and, eventually, to his life as a writer with "fifty francs in hand," heading off to work in a bistro. It is also a manual for the down and out: how to live on bouillon and bread, how to sleep in a Paris cemetery, how to remove a tattoo with the back of a red hot spoon, and how to take a clochard's bath in the freezing Seine. Interspersed with the gritty and complimentary photographs by Patrice Molinard, Clébert's sprawling work is held together by the vividness of his language. Nicholson-Smith's translation conveys effectively the simultaneously vulgar and eloquent prose that inspired later writers, including Henry Miller. Appearing in English for the first time, this volume brings a unique city to life, where "to master it one must indeed be either a vagabond poet or a poet vagabond." Clébert was both. 115 b&w photos. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
"This is not supposed to be a Baedeker or some tourist guide": Clbert offers a hellish itinerary of the less fortunate quarters of Paris.First published in 1952, Clbert's Paris insolite has been classified as a novel, though it is as journalistic as George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London; if it has novelistic kinship, it might be to Jean Genet's Thief's Journal. One of its larger themes is the gentrification of Paris, an ongoing process since the days of Baron Haussmann that quickened after World War II: he writes of the "brutal disappearance of the Saint-Sverin district, with its pick-up-sticks players and its hordes of derelicts," while admitting that the city is dotted with "inhuman holes" that might stand a little policing up. Writing of the "lower depthsof a Paris to which the public is forbidden entry," Clbertor his alter ego, at any ratehas two constant preoccupations. He is hungry, ravenously hungry, all the time, and he observes bitterly, "You always come back to the same old question: how are you going to eat?" There are soup kitchens and charity wards, of course, but the Clbert-ian vagabond has his dignity. Then there is sex: if one is hungry and poor, who will partner with him? The answers are several and sometimes tiresome in their macho boastfulness: "All you fine chicks, young and fresh, who found pleasure with this city vagabond, I thank you!" The photographs, by Molinard, are in the stark documentary style of a Weegee or Robert Frank; some are quite ordinary, but others stand out, such as an anti-Djeuner sur l'herbe in which three poor people gather around a makeshift hearth for warmth and companionship. Altogether, they add to the impression that this is less a novel than a book of reportage. But no matter how it's classified, it's a sobering, eyes-wide-open view of the Paris no guidebook would care to portray. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
