Our Paris: Sketches from Memory

by Edmund White, Hubert Sorin

What happens when one of our most celebrated writers combines talents with a French artist and architect to capture life in their Parisian neighborhood? The result is a lighthearted, gently satiric portrait of the heart of Paris -- including the Marais, Les Halles, the two islands in the Seine, and the Châtelet -- and the people who call it home. It is an enchantingly varied world, populated not only by dazzling literati and ultrachic couturiers and art dealers but also by poetic shopkeepers, grandmotherly prostitutes, and, ever underfoot, an irrepressible basset hound named Fred. The foibles and eccentricities of these sometimes outrageous, always memorable individuals are brought to life with unfailing wit and affection.

Below the surface of the sparkling humor in Our Paris, there is a tragic undercurrent. While Hubert Sorin was completing this work, he was nearing the end of his struggle with AIDS. The book is a tribute to the loving spirit with which the authors banished somberness and celebrated the pleasures of their life together.

Genres: Nonfiction, LGBT, Travel, Memoir, France, Biography, Queer

160 pages, Hardcover

First published November 25, 1994

About the author

Edmund Valentine White III was an American novelist, memoirist, playwright, biographer, and essayist. He was the recipient of Lambda Literary's Visionary Award, the National Book Foundation's Lifetime Achievement Award, and the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction. France made him Chevalier (and later Officier) de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1993.
White was known as a groundbreaking writer of gay literature and a major influence on gay American literature and has been called "the first major queer novelist to champion a new generation of writers."

Reviews

[Alyson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful! A wonderful vision of Paris, one that makes me desperately want to go back and look up all the places and people described in the book. As others have stated, the backdrop is one of sadness, but lighthearted descriptions of all the characters and landmarks that flitted in and out of their daily lives make this an easy, fast, and delightful read. The illustrations are equally fun and lighthearted, and I enjoyed playing "Where's Fred?" each time I reached a new picture.

[Steve Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

This isn't a book I'd normally read. A friend let me have the pick of his late mother's library before having me cart the others off, and I set this on aside without really knowing what it was about. I thought my wife might like it.

White chronicles a period of time he lived in Paris with his dying lover (and the book's illustrator), Hubert Sorin, and their basset hound Fred. White introduces the reader to a host of larger than life characters that he and Hubert and Fred encountered in Paris. We meet various luminaries of the glitterati and literati, slightly off but fascinating people. White seems so sensitive and observant that I get the feel nobody in his world is permitted to be mundane.

I'm going to have to check out some of his other stuff.

[ATS · Rating 2 out of 5]

I stumbled upon this book in a secondhand bookstore somewhere in London and was fascinated by the introduction line about Hubert Sorin. I flipped through it and fell in love with the illustrations.

I read it sporadically in a week because it's not exactly a pageturner. I mean, I couldn't really care about Edmund White's name-drops, didn't care about who is who's grand-niece or what upper-class Parisians talk about at dinner parties.

I do care about Sorin's almost satirical depiction of the people and the simple slices of life that sometimes Edmund White will provide (after 10 pages of him flexing about the famous people he had brunch with).

[Brenda D · Rating 3 out of 5]

Our Paris is quirky and disjointed - a kaleidoscope of jumbled memories and art fragments. Little connects these vignettes other than the fact they took place in Paris in the year(s) preceding his partner's death from Aids.

I haven't read any of Edmund White's other books but I can't say I am impressed with his writing style. Not only is it poorly written but the amount of name dropping is excessive! However, I did "meet" a few (not very) famous, but interesting characters with the help of research on Wikipedia.

Overall the book is nostalgic and bittersweet - an account of a life that is somewhat dated and would be truly a lost fragment without this momento mori ... Still, I'm not sure I can recommend and it would mean very little to anyone young (someone who doesn't remember the Aids epidemic) ... yet I don't think it is not a book I will soon forget either ...

Favourite Quote from Our Paris: "... in accordance with the laws that we are always attracted by opposites and then try to turn them into twins (if we don't succeed we're constantly angry, and if we do we lose interest and find a new partner, even more outrageously unsuitable) ... (p.89)"

[margaret · Rating 5 out of 5]

"So many of my friends with AIDS have wanted to write a book or make some other kind of work of art to celebrate or at least to mark their passage on earth and in time. Few of these ambitions have been realized, either because illness has interfered with their execution or the because the world (or the marketplace) has taken no interest in their efforts."

This gentle memoir marks the passage of Hubert Sorin. It's a beautiful tribute, with cheerful, sweetly boastful (there's no end of name-dropping - all to the good in my opinion) stories written to match Sorin's illustrations.

[fwarg]

A really charming little memoir, illustrated by Hubert Sorin that mostly focusing on Edmund White’s life in Paris in the 90s and his cast of fabulous friends (so many notable cameos). While Sorin and White were partners, the focus of this book is much more on White’s life in Paris and his observations on parisien life and culture.

[Poptartk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Charming and funny and poignant.

[William · Rating 5 out of 5]

:'(

[Carol Griffiths · Rating 4 out of 5]

A delightful little memoir about people and places in Paris in the 1990s. Edmund White's prose is witty and charming as are Hubert Sorin's illustrations. Fred the basset hound is the star.

[Zed]

Wasn't what I was expecting. It's more about Edmund, and his many, many friends. Read more like pompous boasting throughout. Easy read though.

[Madhusree · Rating 4 out of 5]

A quick read with wonderful sketches. An interesting account of a lovely place & time.

[Noa · Rating 4 out of 5]

The intro made me cry, the book made me smile

[Keith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another great book by a favorite author. Short reflections on life in Paris with drawings by his partner. So good, and moving.

[Ben Ringel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Borrowed this from Harrison and read it in Paris which was lovely. Short and sweet and funny

[James Loop]

beautiful

[anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

freaking gorgeous and charming

[Charles Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

One day I hope to visit Paris; it is a city that has always fascinated me.Part of my fascination has been sparked by accounts by and/or about famous American writers who once lived there: Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, et al. Now it's Edmund White's turn to bedazzle me with the sights, sounds, and smells of that fabled city.

"Our Paris: Sketches from Memory" is a collaborative project he worked on with his now deceased (from AIDS) lover, Hubert Sorin, the French architect turned artist. It combines words and pictures.

White's descriptions of Parisian life, which includes anecdotes involving an army of characters (a few of whom are bizarre), are vivid and often funny. Like the one about the sixty-something prostitutes who "clobber stiffly down the stretch of cobbled street in their high heels." White surmises that "prostitution is just an innocent excuse for hanging out and chewing the fat with the girls."

Sorin's black-and-white storybook-like drawings superbly complement White's prose and are themselves evocative and humorous.

Throughout "Our Paris," White is an unreluctant name dropper and gossipmonger. For example, he outs a grandson of the super macho Hemingway. The grandson, Ed, "wears the same clothes every day and rarely bathes," but is otherwise "a nice, normal homosexual."

Unfortunately, White is not unreluctant to let his class-consciousness and snobbery show. In one of his descriptions of the upscale Marais district, the neighborhood bordering his own, he refers to it as "a magnet for gay Parisians," who include "[w]olfpacks of guys in leather or jeans, their hair long and silky on top, shaved military style below all the way up to the temple." For White, these gay clones or "Kiki Boys" stir little, if any, interest "unless they're walking a dog--which already sets them apart as neighbors, not Bad Boys, as nice quiet bachelors." (White and Sorin had a basset hound named Fred.) Then they become "men with whom one can have a pleasant chat about the hardheaded (tetu) basset hound versus the crazy (fou-fou) terrier."

"I hope," writes White in the introduction,"at least a few readers will recognize its subtext is love." In 142 pages White succeeds in conveying not only his love for Sorin but also for Paris.

Overall, "Our Paris" will be a delightful reading experience for francophiles and non-francophiles alike.

This review was originally published in a book column I wrote for the Manhattan Spirit (March 15, 1996). It was also published on my blog www.urbanbookmaven.blogspot.com (February 1, 2012) under the title "Gay Paree in Words and Pictures."

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first read this short book 15 years ago, after I'd met and disliked one of the many name-dropped individuals in it's slim chapters. Despite my (and apparently White's) poor impression of this particular American biographer, I loved the book then and find that I still do now. It's an homage to a quotidian life in a busy neighborhood of modern Paris, stylized by Sorin's pen and ink drawings, and perhaps more so by his impending death which lurks beneath the descriptions of a moment in life held between a beginning and an inevitable end.

[Len · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another romp through Paris, another in-depth look at the people and the experiences to be had 'off the map' would have been enough for me, were it not so much more.
Buried in between White's somewhat typical, and interesting-but-kind of-annoying name-dropping, exists the softest and gentlest of love stories between two men from different cultures and backgrounds.
Ending with goodbye in Marrakesh, and me on my couch in tears, I was deeply moved by this beautiful little story that was at once also so giant.

[Rebecca · Rating 2 out of 5]

A fun little read with melancholy undertones about Edmund White's last year in Paris with his boyfriend Hubert Sorin, who died of AIDS. It's light--there's no dealing with illness, death, or loss. But it's charming, frequently about the doings of their friends and their trips about town with their bassett hound, Fred. Lots of name-dropping, but in a good-natured and slightly mortified way. I read it partially for the descriptions of daily life in Paris, and for that, it is quite good.

[Maria Maniaci · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was not what I expected based on knowing beforehand that it was, among other things, an AIDS memoir. But it's a sweet book. Quick and sharp. I liked getting a glimpse into a life so different from mine in time and place and timbre.

Didn't get five stars from me because White's name dropped is a little much at times.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Suffering with the impending loss of his lover, White wrote this book as a project with his dying lover. In it, the two men affectionately, light-heartedly, and lovingly portray their chosen city of residence--Paris--in a series of anecdotes and memories.

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is Ed White in his happiest mode -- retailing good-natured, if occasionally inaccurate, gossip with harmless namedropping. His late partner's microcephalic caricatures are redeemed by White's touching tribute at the end.

[Naomi Jayalaksana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Brings world's juiciest jet zet's gossip straight from their own mouth...

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

terribly sad ending.

[pjr8888]

wonderfully illustrated with numerous witty and gently satiric drawings by Hurbert Sorin, a trained archetct

[Djdee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Witty drawings and superb descriptions of everyday life in Paris.