A Walk Through Paris
A Radical Exploration
Eric Hazan author David Fernbach translator
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Verso Books
Published:27th Mar '18
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A walker's guide to Paris, taking us through its past, present and possible futures
Eric Hazan, author of the acclaimed The Invention of Paris, leads us by the hand in this walk from Ivry to Saint-Denis, roughly following the meridian that divides Paris into east and west, and passing such familiar landmarks as the Luxembourg Gardens, the Pompidou Centre, the Gare du Nord and Montmartre, as well as little-known alleyways and arcades. Filled with historical anecdotes, geographical observations and literary references, Hazan's walk guides us through an unknown Paris. He shows us how, through planning and modernisation, the city's revolutionary past has been erased in order to enforce a reactionary future; but by walking and observation, he shows us how we can regain our knowledge of the radical past of the city of Robespierre, the Commune, Sartre and the May '68 uprising. And by drawing on his own life story, as surgeon, publisher and social critic, Hazan vividly illustrates a radical life lived in the city of revolution.
Eric Hazan's elegant, characteristically learned account of his journey through contemporary Paris, written in a tone both intimate and authoritative, is at once a companionably unhurried evocation of the city's rich, radical past and - at a time when capital is dramatically reorganising its topography - a bracingly urgent intervention in debates about the city's future. As Andre Breton might have observed, there really are no lost steps here. -- Matthew Beaumont, author of Nightwalking
Still more than a historian, Éric Hazan is a writer, in a prestigious literary lineage of solitary walkers. At the same time phenomenological and historical, ethnographic and political, documented and dreamed, this walk is above all a literary experience. -- Jean-Marie Durand * Les Inrockuptibles *
The crossing of the capital we areoffered by the Parisian Éric Hazan is both delightful and erudite. -- Gilles Heuré * Télérama *
An ardent student of the anatomy of the city, Hazan is a keen observer with a remarkable memory: despite his limitations, he has written an unmissable account of Paris's unique and defiant physiognomy. -- Lauren Elkin * Guardian *
In tracing a continuity of resistance and its presence within the contradictions of the contemporary city, Hazan makes a compelling argument that 'the people have not lost the battle of Paris'...This book similarly brings the solitary act of reading and the social experience of urban life into constant dialogue. Passages from Balzac, Baudelaire and André Breton come to mind at different street corners, verbal illuminations reflecting the ambience of a particular locale. In these enlightened pages, Hazan deftly guides the reader through a Paris where history and literature animate the lived experience of the present. -- Eugene Brennan * Washington Post *
Hazan is much concernced with riot, insurrection, protest, and revolution. He is, naturally, on the side of the proletariat...A Walk Through Paris is sometimes a work of urbanism, sometimes a subversive history book, sometimes a kind of tourist guide. -- Geoff Nicholson * LA Review of Books *
ISBN: 9781786632586
Dimensions: 210mm x 140mm x 23mm
Weight: 370g
208 pages