Les Ruines de Paris

by Jacques Réda

From Belleville to Passy, from Montmartre to La-Butte-aux-Cailles, from Antony to Saint-Ouen – Jacques Réda is a traveler in his own city of Paris. In the tradition of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, he is a nervous, rather unleisurely flâneur, unsettling and subverting preconceived ideas about travel and home.

The Ruins of Paris echoes with the footsteps and the words of a wanderer by turns gloomy, curious, troubled, elated, angry, tender and confused (and sometimes all these things at once). We are led through the arrondissements and suburbs of Paris and beyond in a journey that moves to the rhythm of walking, of trains, to the hopeful tempo of upbeat jazz.

Réda the wanderer is forever on the move: he constantly sets off, stops, begins afresh, treasuring movement itself while journeying from place to place. Journeys that are at once exhilarating and familiar, journeys that mirror life itself and a world that ceaselessly rises anew from its own ruins. Jacques Réda's book is both a poetic meditation on Paris and a haunting companion to its views and moods.

"In France, Jacques Réda's prose writings are passed back and forth between friends with the enthusiastic secret-sharing that one associates with fan clubs. Membership requirements include a taste for precise, tenderly ironic prose, polished to a delicacy of finish rarely attained by contemporary French writers."—John Taylor, Times Literary Supplement

Genres: Poetry, Literature, French Literature, France

190 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Jacques Réda was a French poet, jazz critic, and flâneur. He was awarded the Prix Valery Larbaud in 1983, and was chief editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française from 1987 to 1996.

Reviews

[sadeleuze · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Ruins of Paris is a book of poems, most of them written in prose. It's an urban wandering through landscapes at the rhythm of walking, in a lyrical and meditative reflection.

I really liked "arrêts, buffets, liaisons routières".

[Moro · Rating 1 out of 5]

Il m’a soûlé. Je ne l’ai pas fini. Je ne comprends pas où il veut en venir l’auteur.

[TinHouseBooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heather Hartley (Paris Editor): Jacques Réda’s The Ruins of Paris guides the reader through the city’s neighborhoods and suburbs–from beautiful to gritty, noble to popular, spirited to silent. A true flâneur (stroller or walker or loafer), Réda moves from Montmartre to Belleville to St. Germain des Prés to everywhere in between. His love of jazz music is evident in his syncopated, lyrical and at times disjointed prose. “A courtyard, no, an impasse that is illuminated by a solitary tree–I stop. But it’s not out of curiosity that I keep walking past the dark wood . . .”

[Don Socha · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this in a hurry and now hope to read it again more slowly. The author's sharp focus on surface details might remind us of Robbe-Grillet. But it is more about relations one might experience with one's environment. In this way one might describe it as phenomenological field notes.

[Xo · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the most descriptive, lovely documents of any city, narrated by a man who is unafraid to admit to his values, powerful yet reserved in their essence.