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32nd out of 268 books
—
285 voters
The Flaneur
by
Edmund White
Bloomsbury is proud to announce the first title in an occasional series in which some of the world's finest novelists reveal the secrets of the city they know best. These beautifully produced, pocket-sized books will provide exactly what is missing in ordinary travel guides: insights and imagination that lead the reader into those parts of a city no other guide can reach.
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Hardcover, 211 pages
Published
March 21st 2001
by Bloomsbury USA
(first published January 1st 2001)
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The Flaneur
I first became familiar with the word “Flaneur” when a collection of Walter Benjamin’s writings called “The Arcade Projects” was published in 1999.
It included a 1929 review called “The Return of the Flâneur”.
In it, Benjamin speculates on the significance of the “Flaneur”, a French word meaning “stroller” or “saunterer”.
It describes someone who walks the street, apparently idly, not intending to simply get from point A to point B, but seeking more to observe and experience the street a...more
I first became familiar with the word “Flaneur” when a collection of Walter Benjamin’s writings called “The Arcade Projects” was published in 1999.
It included a 1929 review called “The Return of the Flâneur”.
In it, Benjamin speculates on the significance of the “Flaneur”, a French word meaning “stroller” or “saunterer”.
It describes someone who walks the street, apparently idly, not intending to simply get from point A to point B, but seeking more to observe and experience the street a...more
Read this little book yesterday on the bus as I was on my way to and from NY to see the Morandi show at the Met and the Eggleston show at the Whitney. Even as I was nodding off on the way back, with the Chipmunks movie loudly broadcast throughout the bus, I couldn't put it down.
The flaneur premise was an ingenious way for White to write anything he felt like about Paris. As I was reading it I could envision a whole flaneur series of books of not only every city in the world but any thing any per...more
The flaneur premise was an ingenious way for White to write anything he felt like about Paris. As I was reading it I could envision a whole flaneur series of books of not only every city in the world but any thing any per...more
Ahhh. So nice to read a master of the sentence. My only problem with this is that it's unifying principle, flaneury, doesn't really unify it. I couldn't put it down though. He's a master of the essay. Also, it purports to be a book about a city (Paris). It is more a book of spotty, thematically organized artistic and sexual histories. Graceful and hilarious. Anecdotal, well-researched, a dessert book.
I started this book about 6 months ago and enjoyed the rolling erudition of the narrative. But when I set it down I didn't rush to find it and finish it. When I pulled it from a stack yesterday I knew I had to read it all and get a sense of the arc. The writing is twice as good as I remembered it and the gossip about arts in Paris is unbeatable, with news about James Baldwin and Gertrude Stein and Marie Antoinette--and her heirs. There are quotes too from French intellects like Balzac and de Bea...more
Wow, I just finished this book yesterday. Roslyn Raney gave it to me as a gift in 2008,I was not interested in reading it then but happened to pull it off my bookshelf two weeks ago and it has been a fun ride. I have never been to Paris but this book gave me a birds's eye view from so many perspectives as the flaneur is apparently a person who strolls about observing the intricacies of public life. The author, Edmund White, is an American who lived in Paris for many years. He describes Paris bas...more
A trifle I breezed through last night and this morning; but even the least of Edmund White is worth the read. I've always liked how he embraces the seaminess and the poignance of any human scene. He's lurid and wise at once, relishing the dirty details while telling you how brave and beautiful human desire is. So an ideal travel writer, really. His 'States of Desire: Travels in Gay America' is out of print; snatch it up if you stumble across a copy.
Quick, fascinating meditation on Paris by a long-time resident, American writer Edmund White. White knows his subject and does a nice job balancing more informative passages with lively anecdotes and observations. The chapter on the reception of minorities over the years is particularly fascinating (American blacks were generally well-received but anti-semitism has long been a problem). Equally fascinating is a chapter about the treatment of gays: anti-sodomy laws were banned in 1791, a protecti...more
I just finished another book on Paris (Paris I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down by Rosecrans Baldwin) that I didn't like and this book was a good antidote. Baldwin's book is poorly written--full of awkward phrasings and transitions as well as unsympathetic characters. White, by contrast, is a very fine writer who manages to offer some fresh summaries of the lives of numerous well-known Parisian historical personnages (Colette, Baudelaire, Louis XIV and Marie Antoinette, etc). I would have li...more
Aug 27, 2009
Emmy
is currently reading it
Yes, another book I am reading along with the other ones. It's best to read this on the subway, not in bed before sleep. It's possible that I'll somehow begin to like Baudelaire, whom White mentions, after reading this book.
A bit pretentious and often unintentionally intimidating--the title is a forewarning in and of itself: who "strolls" through paradoxes, non? Yet, "The Flaneur" is one of the most fascinating books written on the teeming vibrancy of Paris if simply because it addresses what so, so many books on Paris do not: how much of that vibrancy is due to outsider/borderland culture, not native Parisians, and where traces of that culture can still be found. Much of White's descriptions of blacks, gays, Jews,...more
White writes about what one would expect: Genet, Baudelaire, and the Left Bank. What I found most interesting was his theory of how French identity, by discouraging a homosexual identity, slowed down the response to the HIV-epidemic as compared to the UK and America. And I was pleased to see a few pages on Gustave Moreau and his museum.
I find it hard to be a flaneur. Though Paris, with its numerous short and winding streets, does support--if not encourage--such meandering more than the long rect...more
I find it hard to be a flaneur. Though Paris, with its numerous short and winding streets, does support--if not encourage--such meandering more than the long rect...more
“And no wonder Paris, land of novelty and distraction, is the great city of the flaneur – that aimless stroller who loses himself in the crowd, who has no destination and goes wherever caprice or curiosity dictates his or her steps.”
What is there to say about Paris that has not already been said? Ask any person on the street and he will tell you Paris is the best. And the worst. Alive. And dying. But when one is asked to write about Paris, one must. And thus this book. White uses the pages of th...more
What is there to say about Paris that has not already been said? Ask any person on the street and he will tell you Paris is the best. And the worst. Alive. And dying. But when one is asked to write about Paris, one must. And thus this book. White uses the pages of th...more
I chose this book from the title alone, and it lived up to the expectations. Like the flaneur himself, this book ambles gently and easily through Paris in all it's modes - historical, "current" (at least based on the author's term there in the 80s), philosophical, and cultural. He treats the less attractive sides of living in Paris with the same matter-of-fact curiosity as it's more delightful. A great book for those who know and love Paris, or those who want to visit vicariously and see a side...more
I was fortunate to have been given this book as a gift from my amazing boss, the day I left for Paris. However, it was unfortunate that I didn't read most of on the plane, before I landed. My time in Paris would not have been any less enjoyable, but it would have been more insightful and quaint. That's pretty much how I found The Flaneur. Not to diminish the visible work and research that Edmund White put into this short piece of non-fiction, but White saunters through the history and streets of...more
From http://lanew-yorkaise.com/
“For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate observer, it’s an immense pleasure to take up residence in multiplicity, in whatever’s seething, moving, evanescent and infinite: you’re not at home, but you feel at home everywhere, you see everyone, you’re at the center of everything yet you remain hidden from everybody…The amateur of life enters into the crowd as into an immense reservoir of electricity.”
-Charles Baudelaire
The flâneur in Edmund White’s novel of the sa...more
“For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate observer, it’s an immense pleasure to take up residence in multiplicity, in whatever’s seething, moving, evanescent and infinite: you’re not at home, but you feel at home everywhere, you see everyone, you’re at the center of everything yet you remain hidden from everybody…The amateur of life enters into the crowd as into an immense reservoir of electricity.”
-Charles Baudelaire
The flâneur in Edmund White’s novel of the sa...more
Aptly subtitled “A Stroll though the Paradoxes of Paris”, White’s first travelogue –according to my recollection, as all of his work I’ve read to date have been fiction – meanders its way through Paris past and present A virtual mind-walk through the City of Lights, this is. He starts off this slender volume (best read on a rainy weekend afternoon) by criticizing the current state of Gallic affairs.
"…Paris itself has become a cultural backwater. There aren’t more than two or three internationall...more
"…Paris itself has become a cultural backwater. There aren’t more than two or three internationall...more
Mar 09, 2009
Cameron
rated it
4 of 5 stars
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
traversing-the-globe,
queer
Flânerie as explicated by Edmund White is less about actual locomotion than the exploratory urge, the quest to investigate the cracks within the city, specifically Paris. He details the flâneur as a distinctly Parisian creation, drawing upon the city's nuances and dichotomies, its ethnic character, literary and artistic traditions, and the nature of the Parisians themselves.
This is not a book about walking in Paris, and yet, that is all it concerns. The stroll White takes us on touches upon a g...more
This is not a book about walking in Paris, and yet, that is all it concerns. The stroll White takes us on touches upon a g...more
Being a Paris junkie and an Edmund White fan made me pick this book up in London and devour it in the Tube. Not being in Paris made the detail and smells and memories all the spicier. I loved the random wandering of the words as much as I imagined White roaming through his years there. I picked up some history I didn't know, some authors I've since read, and just enjoyed being led along through the city. An easy read for the Paris lover, perhaps better to be a little acquainted with White's worl...more
For anyone who is interested in that masterpiece of cities, Paris, I highly recommend this little book. It is highly selective, deliberately highlighting places that do not typically appear in guidebooks. The majority of the book deals with several disparate groups of people who have found refuge in the City of Lights: (1) Afro-Americans; (2) Jews; (3) gays; and (4) royalists and/or monarchists. There is also a chapter dedicated to the Musée Gustave Moreau on the Right Bank and the Hôtel de Lauz...more
The bottom line might be that I'm just not very good at non-fiction. Memoir is the exception, but probably only because it reads like fiction. In The Flaneur, White takes readers through dark corners and forgotten alley-ways of Paris -- through scandal, through decay, and through memory. For a particularly passionate francophile, this might be an ideal book, as White presents things that the average American visiting Paris would never see or know. He discusses how race has changed in Paris, how...more
I enjoyed a trip back into some of the more specific history of Paris: Jews, minorities, art, architecture. My love of Paris is not unknown to anyone who knows me. I could spend hours being a “Flaneur” in this city. Just walking aimlessly down streets where there is not a tourist in sight. This history of Paris is so rich and continues to amaze me. One of the reasons that I read this book is that I’m planning a trip next year again to my favourite city.
This booked surprised me in a good way. When I picked it up I thought it would be another one of those sentimental pieces about how amazing Paris is. It is, sort of, but Edmund White is closely attuned to the contradictions of French society and the social and political injustices that have shaped it and shaped Paris. This becomes the book's strength, because it's not what you expect a piece called "The Flaneur" to be about. In fact, Paris the city hardly figures at all in some chapters, but pro...more
I loved this little gem of a book, part of Bloomsbury's Writer and the City series. Although the title "The Flaneur" suggests some sort of journey through the sights of Paris, from the famous to hidden nooks known only to Parisian denizens, it really is more an account of the city's lesser known stories and history. From the African American and Jewish presence in Paris, to the more esoteric of Parisian museums beloved by White (the Gustave Moreau museum and the Hotel de Lauzun), the gay communi...more
If Goodreads allowed you to do 1/2 stars, I'd give this one a 3.5. I've read some of Edmund White's fiction, so I expected the book to be well written and interesting. And, maybe I'm being greedy, but somehow I wanted more from him.
What was interesting was the White gives voice to a whole host of people that live "in the margins" in Paris. He gives us an interesting mix of history and his personal observations about what it means to be a woman, a man, a foreigner, a transvestite, a Jew, a royal...more
What was interesting was the White gives voice to a whole host of people that live "in the margins" in Paris. He gives us an interesting mix of history and his personal observations about what it means to be a woman, a man, a foreigner, a transvestite, a Jew, a royal...more
Oh Edmund White, you are what you are. Terribly catty at times, this is a kind of Paris frippery, but that's not to say it doesn't have some pleasures in it.
Parts were excellent and parts were dull. But theres something for everyone in this wee book. Recommended for anyone fascinated by Paris.
I loved this book. It was a perfect mix of art/music/random knowledge history from around the turn of the century and the author's experience of living in Paris during the 20 years he spent there. Some parts are odd, when he randomly gets into talking about the history/struggles of homosexuality--I think he devotes an entire chapter to it (he happens to be homosexual) but other than that, which was STILL interesting to read about, the book was captivating.
I felt like I was reading a US weekly t...more
I felt like I was reading a US weekly t...more
Eine wirkliche "Gebrauchsanweisung" für Paris ist das Buch von Edmund White nicht. Es bietet ein paar mehr oder weniger interessante literarisch-historische Ausflüge, denen man in den seltensten Fällen intensiver nachgehen kann als sich vor die entsprechende Hausnummer einer Strasse zu stellen. Im Vordergrund steht für White das schwule Paris und neben seinen Anekdoten, die sich fast immer darauf beziehen, bei welchen wichtigen Parisern und Pariserinnen er schon zu Gast war, bietet er vor allem...more
A random wandering offering a bit of history on a little of everything - Collette, Proust, Jews, Muslims, gays, sites, etc.
My very favorite book about Paris to read when I'm in Paris, and to follow as much as possible in its footsteps.
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Edmund White's novels include Fanny: A Fiction, A Boy's Own Story, The Farewell Symphony, and A Married Man. He is also the author of a biography of Jean Genet, a study of Marcel Proust, The Flâneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris, and, most recently, his memoir, My Lives. Having lived in Paris for many years, he is now a New Yorker and teaches at Princeton University. He was also a membe...more
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May 07, 2013 12:48am
May 07, 2013 12:49am