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East village blues
Au milieu des années 1970, Chantal Thomas, qui vient juste de soutenir sa thèse, décide de partir. Loin. À New York, alors cité de tous les dangers. Elle s'installe chez une amie d'amie. Le désir circule, les fêtes s'enchaînent. Un puissant souffle d'aventure anime la ville.
Aujourd'hui, amenée à séjourner dans l'East Village pour un été, elle retrouve un quartier totalement changé. Seules quelques traces demeurent de la marginalité d'autrefois, des graffitis sur les rares immeubles non encore " réhabilités " et dont Allen S. Weiss, partenaire de ce livre, va extraire des images photographiques qui rappellent un temps révolu.
Car l'East Village était un lieu d'immigration et de bohème pauvre, inventive, où tout le monde se rêvait poète, où se rencontraient Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Herbert Huncke, et les fantômes bien vivants d'Andy Warhol, de Lou Reed et du Velvet Underground.
Au fil des pages, sur un mode à la fois précis et romanesque, Chantal Thomas évoque St. Mark's Church, le Chelsea Hotel, les bars, les rues, les peurs, les amours, dans un flottement des genres qu'elle restitue à plaisir, comme portée par la grâce d'une mémoire à même de revivre et faire revivre l'intensité d'une époque ouverte à tout. Par les temps qui courent, ce livre est une merveilleuse évasion, et le rappel d'une chose : la liberté est possible, elle est même un excellent principe de vie...
I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel
You were talking so brave and so free...
Leonard Cohen
Avec des photos d'Allen S. Weiss
Aujourd'hui, amenée à séjourner dans l'East Village pour un été, elle retrouve un quartier totalement changé. Seules quelques traces demeurent de la marginalité d'autrefois, des graffitis sur les rares immeubles non encore " réhabilités " et dont Allen S. Weiss, partenaire de ce livre, va extraire des images photographiques qui rappellent un temps révolu.
Car l'East Village était un lieu d'immigration et de bohème pauvre, inventive, où tout le monde se rêvait poète, où se rencontraient Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Herbert Huncke, et les fantômes bien vivants d'Andy Warhol, de Lou Reed et du Velvet Underground.
Au fil des pages, sur un mode à la fois précis et romanesque, Chantal Thomas évoque St. Mark's Church, le Chelsea Hotel, les bars, les rues, les peurs, les amours, dans un flottement des genres qu'elle restitue à plaisir, comme portée par la grâce d'une mémoire à même de revivre et faire revivre l'intensité d'une époque ouverte à tout. Par les temps qui courent, ce livre est une merveilleuse évasion, et le rappel d'une chose : la liberté est possible, elle est même un excellent principe de vie...
I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel
You were talking so brave and so free...
Leonard Cohen
Avec des photos d'Allen S. Weiss
208 pages, Paperback
Published April 18, 2019
About the author
Chantal Thomas
75 books38 followersChantal Thomas (born 1945 in Lyon) is a French writer and historian. Her 2002 book, Farewell, My Queen, won the Prix Femina and was adapted into a 2012 film starring Diane Kruger and Léa Seydoux.
Thomas was born in Lyon in 1945, and was raised in Arcachon, Bordeaux, and Paris. Her life has included teaching jobs at American and French universities (such as Yale and Princeton) as well as a publishing career. She has published nineteen works, including essays on the Marquis de Sade, Casanova, and Marie Antoinette.
In 2002, Thomas published Les adieux à la reine (Farewell, My Queen). The novel gave a fictional account of the final days of Marie Antoinette in power through the perspective of one of her servants. It won the Prix Femina in 2002, and was later adapted into the 2012 film Farewell, My Queen. The film stars Diane Kruger as the titular queen and Léa Seydoux as her servant Sidonie Laborde. Thomas co-wrote the screenplay,and it opened the 62nd Berlin International Film Festival. Helen Falconer of The Guardian called the work "a well written slice of history" with "evocative, observant prose," but criticized it for creating a narrator who "merely provides us with a pair of eyes to see through rather than capturing our interest in her own right." While disagreeing in its classification as a novel, Falconer did however add that Farewell, My Queen "generates in the reader a real sense of being a fly on the wall, eavesdropping on the affairs of the great and the not so good."
Thomas is currently the director of research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research.
(from Wikipedia)
Thomas was born in Lyon in 1945, and was raised in Arcachon, Bordeaux, and Paris. Her life has included teaching jobs at American and French universities (such as Yale and Princeton) as well as a publishing career. She has published nineteen works, including essays on the Marquis de Sade, Casanova, and Marie Antoinette.
In 2002, Thomas published Les adieux à la reine (Farewell, My Queen). The novel gave a fictional account of the final days of Marie Antoinette in power through the perspective of one of her servants. It won the Prix Femina in 2002, and was later adapted into the 2012 film Farewell, My Queen. The film stars Diane Kruger as the titular queen and Léa Seydoux as her servant Sidonie Laborde. Thomas co-wrote the screenplay,and it opened the 62nd Berlin International Film Festival. Helen Falconer of The Guardian called the work "a well written slice of history" with "evocative, observant prose," but criticized it for creating a narrator who "merely provides us with a pair of eyes to see through rather than capturing our interest in her own right." While disagreeing in its classification as a novel, Falconer did however add that Farewell, My Queen "generates in the reader a real sense of being a fly on the wall, eavesdropping on the affairs of the great and the not so good."
Thomas is currently the director of research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research.
(from Wikipedia)
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
April 27, 2023
Last summer, as I was waiting for a friend in McSorley's, New York's oldest pub, an old woman sitting at the other side of the table turned to me and asked "Vous êtes français ?" I answered yes. I've just arrived in the city for the first time. Regardless of the jet-lag's dizziness, I was happy to meet a stranger who seemed just as pleased to find someone who spoke the same language. After a quick chat, I asked her how long she intended to stay. With some kind of pretentious grin, she answered she had been living here for all her life. As I was traveling in the city to accomplish the dream of a lifetime and take my marks for a future move, she gained a sudden interest to my eyes. I sensed the opportunity to get some information regarding immigration. I told her about my dream, but all she could answer was "Mon garçon, si vous voulez vous installer, il n'y a que deux solutions : vous marier ou venir illégalement." I guess it's not necessary to say that both options aren't convenient. "Mais comment avez-vous fait, vous ?" She simply told me that she settled in the city illegally. "Comme tout le monde à l'époque."
Back in the bookshops, Andy Warhol's look had always kept me going back to the shelves where the book was standing. As I'm preparing my departure, I thought I could find a voice similar to the one singing in my heart when I hear out-loud the city's name. I did not.
I wanted to like that book. I wanted it so much as I kept fantasizing about it. I really tried, I could only feel my disappointment grow bigger as I was turning the pages. Chantal Thomas looks back at her years in the city. She arrived there as a young woman ready to join the passionate ride of the seventies. Even though the beginning of the book seems promising as the reader is drove by Chantal's passion, the book always keep the reader on the surface without diving inside the maelstrom. Chantal Thomas's narrative clearly lacks some power to keep the reader as enthusiast as her just as it lacks some contrast. The writing is either precious, candid and sometimes even academic. The narrator goes to New York with a whim for the Beat Generation, which she goes back to along the book almost too much. She keeps dragging about the desire to live in a bohemian state when she's not looking at the present times with contempt for the modern society. This way, she makes the crucial mistake of mixing a real state of poverty and the choice of a bohemian life. She looks at real hobos on the subway with the same romantic vision she looks at Allen Ginsberg & co, - just as Patti Smith does with Rimbaud in France -and lacks the opportunity to explore the contrast between those two categories of people, especially as a foreigner. In the book, the young narrator never really goes across any material difficulties, apart from the time she's being kicked out by the friend she's staying at. She goes from party to party with joy and innocence.Yet, the book is closing on a chaotic scene which finds the city being sacked the night the citizens are experiencing a full black out. Instead of seing the horror I felt reading that scene, the author describes with enthusiasm what she sees as an opportunity for the poor to take the city back, and delight herself with the atmosphere of apocalypse, in another party.
The prominence of nostalgia added to the disdain for the present times represent to my opinion the worst tools for legacy. Just like that old woman's advices in the pub, that book feels irrelevant. Instead of filling me with hope and encouragement, it left me puzzled and irritated.
158 pages later, I still have no plans of getting married.
Back in the bookshops, Andy Warhol's look had always kept me going back to the shelves where the book was standing. As I'm preparing my departure, I thought I could find a voice similar to the one singing in my heart when I hear out-loud the city's name. I did not.
I wanted to like that book. I wanted it so much as I kept fantasizing about it. I really tried, I could only feel my disappointment grow bigger as I was turning the pages. Chantal Thomas looks back at her years in the city. She arrived there as a young woman ready to join the passionate ride of the seventies. Even though the beginning of the book seems promising as the reader is drove by Chantal's passion, the book always keep the reader on the surface without diving inside the maelstrom. Chantal Thomas's narrative clearly lacks some power to keep the reader as enthusiast as her just as it lacks some contrast. The writing is either precious, candid and sometimes even academic. The narrator goes to New York with a whim for the Beat Generation, which she goes back to along the book almost too much. She keeps dragging about the desire to live in a bohemian state when she's not looking at the present times with contempt for the modern society. This way, she makes the crucial mistake of mixing a real state of poverty and the choice of a bohemian life. She looks at real hobos on the subway with the same romantic vision she looks at Allen Ginsberg & co, - just as Patti Smith does with Rimbaud in France -and lacks the opportunity to explore the contrast between those two categories of people, especially as a foreigner. In the book, the young narrator never really goes across any material difficulties, apart from the time she's being kicked out by the friend she's staying at. She goes from party to party with joy and innocence.Yet, the book is closing on a chaotic scene which finds the city being sacked the night the citizens are experiencing a full black out. Instead of seing the horror I felt reading that scene, the author describes with enthusiasm what she sees as an opportunity for the poor to take the city back, and delight herself with the atmosphere of apocalypse, in another party.
The prominence of nostalgia added to the disdain for the present times represent to my opinion the worst tools for legacy. Just like that old woman's advices in the pub, that book feels irrelevant. Instead of filling me with hope and encouragement, it left me puzzled and irritated.
158 pages later, I still have no plans of getting married.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 28, 2022
Au cours d’un récent été passé à New York, Chantal Thomas décide re revoir et se remémorer ses découvertes et expériences d’un été de sa jeunesse au milieu des années ‘70 où, élève de Roland Barthes et fraîchement diplômée de littérature, elle part seule à l’aventure dans cette ville, reconnue à l’époque comme celle de tous les dangers. Redécouverte du “East Village” qu’elle avait alors habité, au milieu d’immigrants, d’intellectuels, d’artistes et des premiers Beatniks. Fêtes sans fin, libération sexuelle, homosexualité assumée, orgies de drogues et d’alcool etc…. Rencontres de marginaux célèbres: Allan Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Jean-Michel Basquiat et toute la troupe du Chelsea Hotel… une balade historique sans nostalgie qui fait réaliser que le temps a passé vite…
January 21, 2022
Mon premier livre de cette auteure.
J'ai appris des choses surtout sur Kerouac et Ginsberg, qu'elle admire tant. Mais aussi sur l'ambiance de ce quartier de New-York à l'époque. Surprenant et fascinant de voir de quelle manière Chantal Thomas a adopté ces rues, ces bâtiments malgré les dangers environnants.
J'ai appris des choses surtout sur Kerouac et Ginsberg, qu'elle admire tant. Mais aussi sur l'ambiance de ce quartier de New-York à l'époque. Surprenant et fascinant de voir de quelle manière Chantal Thomas a adopté ces rues, ces bâtiments malgré les dangers environnants.
December 24, 2019
Plongée dans le New York mythique des années 70 à travers le regard d'une grande autrice française contemporaine. Agrémenté de photos de street-art, cette promenade à travers la ville et le temps ne manquera pas de vous faire voyager.
August 29, 2019
Tres beau texte de Chantal Thomas - plutot un essai sur l East Village. Nostalgique de ses nuits folles propice a la creation.
November 6, 2023
A sometimes fetishistic depiction of the neighborhood's singular effervescence in the seventies. Instructive and pleasant but too tame to make a significant aesthetic impact.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews