Book Review: Diane Johnson's Into a Paris Quartier
Book Review: Diane Johnson’s Into a Paris Quartier
This is a lightweight book, meaning that it is not heavy reading in spite of dealing with weighty topics like the architecture and urban history of Paris, the politics of the Wars of Religion, and the St. Bartholomew Day Massacre. Diane Johnson, author of three recent bestsellers (Le Mariage, Le Divorce, and L’Affaire ) in addition to Natural Opium: Some Travelers’ Tales and another half dozen books, has the rare gift of sharing knowledge and insights with unpretentious grace. Key figures from a millennium of French history come alive with their ambitions, intrigues, and love affairs. You’ll find juicy stuff about French Kings and Queens, especially Queen Margot, daughter of Catherine de Médicis, wife of Henry IV, and sister to three other kings.
Throughout the book, there is a deft counterpoint between intimate personal histories and the sweep of great events that changed the world. You learn a lot of French history, but it goes down easily. You also get an unusual view of Paris, not as a tourist site, but as a living city where daily life goes on among the monuments of the past. All people and subjects in Into a Paris Quartier tie in to what is now the sixth arrondissement, the iconic Left Bank neighborhood centered around St.-Germain-des-Prés. Johnson and her husband, John, live on Rue Bonaparte, a few hundred feet from that church, in the oldest in Paris.
Not everything in the book is serious. There are warmly witty anecdotes about Johnson’s neighbors and about the history of their houses, about the art galleries, bookstores and chic stores of the sixth, as well as intriguing bits about its cafés and nightclubs, especially those where French haut monde (and demi monde) hung out in the Twenties and Thirties. Johnson devotes a couple of chapters to interaction between Paris and the American writers and artists who lived in or visited often. She writes about the elegant lesbians who gravitated to the salon of Natalie Barney, a beautiful, rich American. Johnson lists some of the luminaries often found at Miss Barneys, including August Rodin, James Joyce, Edna St. Vincent Millay, T.S. Eliot, Isadora Duncan, Ezra Pound, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Mary McCarthy, and Truman Capote. As my wife said when I read her the list, “it would make one hell of a dinner party.”
The book was just published as part of the National Geographic Directions series of travel-oriented books by major literary figures. I loved the book and admire its author. You will too.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0792272668/ref=ase_bonjourparis-20/104-7392113-7035941?v=glance&s=books
