Strolling through Paris

FOR literary Americans and Bengalis, Paris is a place of pilgrimage. Being neither, my sole visit to the metropolis left me rather underwhelmed. This had nothing to do with its allures which have been extolled times without number, but more with my own timidity and lack of any real understanding of Parisian culture.

My interest in the great city would probably have been whetted if I hadd managed to obtain a copy of Edmund White's wonderful book, The Flaneur : A Stroll through the Paradoxes of Paris before I set foot in its fabled arrondissements. His real passion for the city makes it come alive for the reader (well, this reader at any rate), and it would be hard not to be swept away by his enthusiasm for a city where "virtually every district is beautiful, alluring and full of unsuspected delights". The Flaneur is an attractive little book, and the first in a series that Bloomsbury proposes to publish called "The Writer and the City".

What or who is a flaneur? White provides a succinct description - "[an] aimless stroller who loses himself in the crowd, who has no destination and goes wherever caprice or curiosity directs his or her steps." By this description, the author is a most excellent flaneur and it is a pleasure to accompany him as he wanders around the lle de la Cite and the Ile St Louis, the Boulevard St. Germain, St Germain-des-Pres and, of course, famous streets and avenues and Parisian institutions such as the Left Bank, the Louvre, Maonmartre and the Champs Elysees.

Besides taking in the sights, White also delves deep into Parisian history, sensibly choosing only a few aspects of it to stand for the whole, for the purpose of the book is not to give the reader the definitive history of Paris but rather a taste of its infinite and wide-ranging delights. Writers feature largely in the narrative, given the city's reputation as a haven for those in pursuit of their muse. Hemingway, Baldwin, Wright, Stein, Dickey, James Jones to list the Americans alone, plus, of course, Proust, Baudelaire, Colette. Every corner of the city bears memories of some of the world's greatest writers and White ferrets out some interesting stories.

He investigates other creative artists - painters and musicians, in particular - as he does the great salons that have flourished in the city for centuries.

Paris, in particular, and France in general have earned a reputation for being among the world's fairest societies if not the fairest - non-sectarian, non-racist and profoundly dedicated to the idea of equality. It was not always so, but today France is less racist than most of the world's societies, even aggressively so. White recounts an incident that bears this out. The doorman of a smart club tells him the criteria by which people were admitted or refused: "Well, first of all ,we accept all blacks, then all models, then all celebrities".

Which brings us to Paris's emphasis on fashion and trendiness. White compares Paris and New York and points out that, while in the Big Apple, people could not care less about the way they dress on the street; in the French capital, nobody would dream of venturing out unless they were perfectly turned out - given the Parisian's penchant for checking out people about him wherever he is.

He dwells on the residents' liking for flirting and partying, the relaxed attitude of the French towards sexual excess and the Parisian's fondness for shopping. There are chapters on Jews and royalists, and the city's gay culture.But its greatest attraction, the author asserts, is the incidental pleasure it offers the flaneur.

DAVID DAVIDAR

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