The Flâneur

The enormous falafel at Chez Hanna (that's eggplant on top)When I started reading Edmund White’s The Flâneur, I was surprised by how negative White was—how, for someone who lived in Paris for sixteen years, he didn’t seem to like the contemporary city very much. Admittedly, I didn’t really notice so much pessimism after the first chapter, but his initial nostalgia for a lost, less globalized or commercialized Paris, and his declaration that “the city’s glory days are long in the past” almost made me wonder what I’m doing here.

White’s book is basically the record of a flâneur: where he strolls, what he notices, what thoughts are prompted by a certain bit of Paris. What I really like (and find hugely impressive), though, is the all the background knowledge White provides, off-handedly, as he turns a certain corner or passes by a once-legendary café. I feel like these details of Paris, its history and its current problems and fascinations, all seemingly impromptu and linked to a concrete place, make my meanderings throughout the city so much richer. I was fascinated reading about Paris as a microcosm of complex French-Arab relations, especially when White mentions one of my favorite places in the city, La Mosquée. The largest mosque in Paris, La Mosquée contains a traditional mosque, a hammam (Turkish baths), a restaurant, and a beautiful tea garden serving delicious mint tea and incredible Maghreb (the French term for North African) pastries. (I think that when I leave Paris in December, I may miss these pastries more than any traditional French tarte tatin or gateau opéra.) It’s reassuring to find that I like going to some of the same places as White, an expert on the city of Paris, just as it’s interesting to discover the history and legends behind those places.

Later, White wanders through the Marais, the Jewish quarter, traditionally lower-class but now becoming more and more trendy and gentrified (though still the place to find the best falafel in the city), which leads him into a rambling, fascinating recent history of the Jews of Paris through the lens of one of the major Jewish families living near Parc Monceau in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Now when I walk through the narrow cobblestone streets of the Marais, from gallery to boutique to Chez Hanna to a little bookstore, I can’t help but be aware of the neighborhood’s changing identity, and of Paris’s strange, sometimes welcoming and sometimes fraught relation to its minorities. The notion of French identity can seem like something fixed and easy to define, but wandering around the city, one can’t help but realize how varied and fluid and complicated cultural identity really is, even in Paris.

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