lokster71's review against another edition
5.0
I picked this book up from the Tate Modern after going to see their Dora Maar Exhibition.
I really enjoyed this book, which is a breezy, well-researched and well-written cultural history of Paris from 1940-1950. Famous name after famous name comes at you from the hotels, bars, and cafes with jazz soundtracking their stories - it comes later but the soundtrack to Louis Malle's 'Lift to the Scaffold' by Miles Davis (who appears in this book) might do you for the ideal album to listen to whilst reading this book.
Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Satre are probably the central figures of the story but so many other people are there and works of literature, film, and art are created and feted. It is a story of sex and love, of anger and argument and of creation and the struggle to create. There are lots of Americans. There's Existentialism - and I'd definitely recommend reading Sarah Bakewell's 'At the Existentialist Cafe after you've read this but I think I'd start with this book - and its influences. The book also talks about de Beauvoir's 'The Second Sex' and its impact. Not everyone comes out of it well. There's a lot of carelessness with the hearts of others. And Arthur Koestler is an utter prick, even if he wrote one great book - 'Darkness at Noon' - and his long term girlfriend and briefly wife Mamaine deserves some kind of belated acknowledgement for her role in not just his life but in his work too. These aren't all nice people, despite their work.
It's made Paris 1947-49 my go-to location for 'where I would go if I had a TARDIS' now. It provides you with a list of people whose books you want to read, whose art you want to discover, whose music you want to listen to and whose films you want to see. It makes you want to sit in cafes, drinking coffee and red wine and talking about art and love and life.
Highly recommended. Give it a read.
I really enjoyed this book, which is a breezy, well-researched and well-written cultural history of Paris from 1940-1950. Famous name after famous name comes at you from the hotels, bars, and cafes with jazz soundtracking their stories - it comes later but the soundtrack to Louis Malle's 'Lift to the Scaffold' by Miles Davis (who appears in this book) might do you for the ideal album to listen to whilst reading this book.
Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Satre are probably the central figures of the story but so many other people are there and works of literature, film, and art are created and feted. It is a story of sex and love, of anger and argument and of creation and the struggle to create. There are lots of Americans. There's Existentialism - and I'd definitely recommend reading Sarah Bakewell's 'At the Existentialist Cafe after you've read this but I think I'd start with this book - and its influences. The book also talks about de Beauvoir's 'The Second Sex' and its impact. Not everyone comes out of it well. There's a lot of carelessness with the hearts of others. And Arthur Koestler is an utter prick, even if he wrote one great book - 'Darkness at Noon' - and his long term girlfriend and briefly wife Mamaine deserves some kind of belated acknowledgement for her role in not just his life but in his work too. These aren't all nice people, despite their work.
It's made Paris 1947-49 my go-to location for 'where I would go if I had a TARDIS' now. It provides you with a list of people whose books you want to read, whose art you want to discover, whose music you want to listen to and whose films you want to see. It makes you want to sit in cafes, drinking coffee and red wine and talking about art and love and life.
Highly recommended. Give it a read.
togdon's review
3.0
A mostly chronological smattering of stories involving the writers, artists, musicians, and others who lived through WWII in Paris and the five years after. It didn't feel as cohesive as it could have, but was pretty fascinating all the same.
emilytrmn's review
4.0
Incredibly immersive writing that truly drew me into the lives of artists during the years of the Occupation if Paris up until the summer of 1949. I also think it really captured what it is to be a creative person pursuing creative goals and dedicated to pushing to boundaries of art in response to current world events, not just as an individual but also as a community.
Minus a star because there were times (I felt) where the central through-line of the chapter/figure was deviated from a little too far, which made it tedious to read.
Overall, I think this was one of the best, most emotionally compelling non-fiction books I’ve read and I’ve been inspired to read more from this era because of it.
Minus a star because there were times (I felt) where the central through-line of the chapter/figure was deviated from a little too far, which made it tedious to read.
Overall, I think this was one of the best, most emotionally compelling non-fiction books I’ve read and I’ve been inspired to read more from this era because of it.
pivic's review
3.0
This book could be seen as a complement to Sarah Bakewell's seminal [b:At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails|25658482|At the Existentialist Café Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails|Sarah Bakewell|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1456742264s/25658482.jpg|45480464], where Poiriér has collected a lot of background and information on what some truly exciting persons thought of, did, and how they performed both during and after the Second World War.
Even though it's interesting to hear anecdotes and tidbits, e.g. this one:
...the book is a bit more ephemeral than Bakewell's book for just that reason. The book does, however, weave different kinds of resistance against the Nazis together in a very satisfying and informative way, e.g. how people did all they could to hide art from the Nazis:
It was also exciting to hear of how writers joined to resist:
Not that the end of the war meant that wars were over. Communists and existentialists were fighting, the US disliked Richard Wright so he went to France, and...things were generally a lot more do or die then:
I dig how the philosophers mostly practiced what they preached:
Also:
One of the main strengths of this book is how it contrasts the mundane—if anything was indeed mundane—with the extraordinary. For example, de Beauvoir's endeavour to write what was initially thought to become a neat text:
It's also interesting to read some of de Beauvoir's initial thoughts of Northern America, which subsequently changed, especially with her falling in love with Nelson Algren, which happened later:
The book is like a cut into a decade of a time when many generational and revolutionary ideas and changes occurred within a very short space of time, not least the sexual; bar the feministic movements that were (and are) ongoing at the time, sexuality was not a very locked-down and conservative concept.
All in all, this book is a welcome one if you want to have a good glance into a decade of changes. Still, I cannot help but think of Bakewell's excellent book. They complement each other in a way.
Together, in Paris, our band of brothers and sisters created new codes. They founded the New Journalism, which got its official name a decade later but was born then, in the smoky hotel rooms of the Left Bank, and forever blurred the lines between literature and reportage. Poets and playwrights slowly buried Surrealism and invented the Theater of the Absurd; budding painters transcended Socialist Realism, pushed Geometric Abstraction to its limits, and fostered Action Painting. Philosophers founded new schools of thought such as Existentialism while setting up political parties. Aspiring writers found their voices in Paris’s gutters and the decrepit student rooms of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, while others invented the nouveau roman. Photographers reclaimed their authorship through photojournalism agencies such as Magnum; censored American writers such as Henry Miller published their work first in French; black jazz musicians, fleeing segregation at home, found consecration in the concert halls and jazz clubs of Paris, where New Orleans jazz received its long-overdue appreciation while bebop was bubbling up. Some in the Catholic Church experimented with Marxism, while a colorist and former art gallery owner turned couturier named Christian Dior intoxicated the world with the New Look in fashion design.
Even though it's interesting to hear anecdotes and tidbits, e.g. this one:
La nausée was dedicated to “The Beaver,” a word play in English on the name of his best friend, sparring partner, and lover, Simone de Beauvoir. “Beauvoir” sounds like “beaver” in English pronunciation, which is castor in French. In other words, Simone de Beauvoir became for her close friends “Le Castor” by way of English. Le Castor was, just like Sartre, a brilliant thirty-year-old philosophy teacher, though rather more beautiful. They lived together—that is, they lived in the same shabby hotel, the Hôtel Mistral, 24 rue de Cels, just behind Montparnasse Cemetery, though not in the same room.
...the book is a bit more ephemeral than Bakewell's book for just that reason. The book does, however, weave different kinds of resistance against the Nazis together in a very satisfying and informative way, e.g. how people did all they could to hide art from the Nazis:
Every museum in the country used the plan of evacuation Jaujard had used for the Louvre, each work being treated in order of artistic and historical importance. By autumn 1939, every single artwork of significance had been put in safekeeping. The news, quite inevitably, filtered out. Raymond Lécuyer, in Le Figaro, wrote of “the exodus of paintings,” praised the dedication of the national museums’ keepers, many of them retired veterans from the Great War, and apologized to his readers for being elusive about the whole operation. He could not be specific, nor could he give names, dates, or places, but he wrote: “May [it] be, however, a comfort for you to know that the world’s art heritage is safe from the scientific enterprises of German barbarism.” Having fulfilled his duty to history, Jaujard retreated to his office in the Louvre overlooking the Tuileries Gardens. He was now bracing himself for the inevitable. It might take months, but the Germans would soon be in Paris, he was certain of that. Jaujard may have been ready but, unfortunately, the French army was not.
It was also exciting to hear of how writers joined to resist:
One evening at the end of March 1941, Simone de Beauvoir found a note slipped under the door of her hotel room, in Sartre’s handwriting: “I’m at the Café des Trois Mousquetaires.” Beauvoir ran into the street toward the café. Sartre had tricked the camp’s authorities and had been released under a fake identity. He was changed, he could not stop talking. It was not the kind of romantic reunion she had dreamed of. On learning that Simone had signed an affidavit declaring she was not a Jew, he gave her a stern look. And how could she buy food on the black market? Action was the only word he now cared for. Their friend the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty was also back in Paris. Together, they organized themselves and federated other writers into a resistance group, Socialisme et Liberté. Simone was surprised at Sartre’s vehemence. During the summer of 1941, they cycled together into Vichy France to establish contacts with potential members south of the Occupation line. However, it seemed that the sticking point was the nature of the resistance action the group would carry out. Sartre favored words over bombs.
Not that the end of the war meant that wars were over. Communists and existentialists were fighting, the US disliked Richard Wright so he went to France, and...things were generally a lot more do or die then:
That week, Gallimard’s house fascist, Drieu La Rochelle, bumping into a friend on the avenue de Breteuil, near the Invalides, said: “I’ve made my decision, I’m leaving.” A few hours later he was attempting suicide. Gerhard Heller leaped on his bicycle, arrived at his bedside, and whispered in Drieu’s ear: “I’m slipping a passport for you under your pillow.” The passport had a visa for Spain and Switzerland. But Drieu was fixed on a one-way journey to hell. That night, Gerhard Heller packed his Paris diaries of the last four years, together with a manuscript entrusted to him by Ernst Jünger titled “Peace.” He put the documents in a small tin suitcase and set off toward the Invalides, a small shovel in his hand. The air was muggy; Heller could feel the sweat pearling down his brow. He spotted a tree on the esplanade, looked at the distance and angle between the rue de Constantine, rue Saint-Dominique, and rue de Talleyrand, made a mental note, counted his steps, and started digging discreetly. He felt the urge to—literally—bury his Paris life in order to save himself.
I dig how the philosophers mostly practiced what they preached:
Sartre was known for spending his money freely. Insisting on being paid cash for his work, he liked carrying huge wads of banknotes and always paid at restaurants and cafés, never letting anyone else foot the bill, and left huge tips for the waiters. His generosity was astounding and attracted many friends in temporary or chronic financial difficulty. Sartre would discreetly pay for former students’ abortions, cover the rent of his past and present lovers, make loans to impoverished writers—the people indebted to him were legion. In fact, Sartre had no desire to own anything and, true to his word, never would. Cau quickly realized that his main activity would be to free Sartre from his increasingly busy social life and from all the profiteurs so that he could have long stretches of time during the day to concentrate on his writing.
Also:
However, for her American tour, and to avoid the humiliation of being taken to a tailor as soon as she stepped off the plane at LaGuardia, as had happened to Sartre, whose threadbare clothes had horrified his American hosts, she needed at least one new dress. She bought one in a little maison de couture, a finely knitted black dress, for the exorbitant price of 25,000 francs (the equivalent of about $1,650 today). She walked back to Sartre’s flat and told him, pointing to her shopping bag: “This is my first concession,” and burst into tears.
One of the main strengths of this book is how it contrasts the mundane—if anything was indeed mundane—with the extraordinary. For example, de Beauvoir's endeavour to write what was initially thought to become a neat text:
This was not going to be a short and quick essay. She had started researching The Second Sex, a book that would shake the world. Simone had so far lived her life as she pleased by breaking social conventions, so researching this subject was also a journey of self-discovery. She would understand in the process why she fascinated younger women. Her life was a model of emancipation, one that the younger generation aspired to and one that she was going to analyze in great detail, not shying away from sexually explicit content.
It's also interesting to read some of de Beauvoir's initial thoughts of Northern America, which subsequently changed, especially with her falling in love with Nelson Algren, which happened later:
Talking, drinking, smoking cannabis in Greenwich Village with Wright’s friends, Beauvoir was amazed to discover the chauvinism of the New York intellectuals she met. “Their chauvinism reminded me of my father’s. As for their anti-Communism, it verges on neurosis.” She could not resist taking notes on all the details, the differences, the feelings she experienced. On January 31, 1947, she wrote: “Americans’ politeness and good humor make life so much easier and nicer.” However, she could not help looking beyond the façade: “Yet, I’m starting to find annoying all those imperious invitations to ‘take life on the bright side.’ On every poster, everyone shows their white teeth in a grin that seems to me like tetanus. On the subway, in the streets, in every magazine, those obsessive smiles are chasing me. It is a system. Optimism is necessary to social peace and economic prosperity based on consumption and credit.”
The book is like a cut into a decade of a time when many generational and revolutionary ideas and changes occurred within a very short space of time, not least the sexual; bar the feministic movements that were (and are) ongoing at the time, sexuality was not a very locked-down and conservative concept.
All in all, this book is a welcome one if you want to have a good glance into a decade of changes. Still, I cannot help but think of Bakewell's excellent book. They complement each other in a way.
lokster71's review
5.0
I picked this book up from the Tate Modern after going to see their Dora Maar Exhibition.
I really enjoyed this book, which is a breezy, well-researched and well-written cultural history of Paris from 1940-1950. Famous name after famous name comes at you from the hotels, bars, and cafes with jazz soundtracking their stories - it comes later but the soundtrack to Louis Malle's 'Lift to the Scaffold' by Miles Davis (who appears in this book) might do you for the ideal album to listen to whilst reading this book.
Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Satre are probably the central figures of the story but so many other people are there and works of literature, film, and art are created and feted. It is a story of sex and love, of anger and argument and of creation and the struggle to create. There are lots of Americans. There's Existentialism - and I'd definitely recommend reading Sarah Bakewell's 'At the Existentialist Cafe after you've read this but I think I'd start with this book - and its influences. The book also talks about de Beauvoir's 'The Second Sex' and its impact. Not everyone comes out of it well. There's a lot of carelessness with the hearts of others. And Arthur Koestler is an utter prick, even if he wrote one great book - 'Darkness at Noon' - and his long term girlfriend and briefly wife Mamaine deserves some kind of belated acknowledgement for her role in not just his life but in his work too. These aren't all nice people, despite their work.
It's made Paris 1947-49 my go-to location for 'where I would go if I had a TARDIS' now. It provides you with a list of people whose books you want to read, whose art you want to discover, whose music you want to listen to and whose films you want to see. It makes you want to sit in cafes, drinking coffee and red wine and talking about art and love and life.
Highly recommended. Give it a read.
I really enjoyed this book, which is a breezy, well-researched and well-written cultural history of Paris from 1940-1950. Famous name after famous name comes at you from the hotels, bars, and cafes with jazz soundtracking their stories - it comes later but the soundtrack to Louis Malle's 'Lift to the Scaffold' by Miles Davis (who appears in this book) might do you for the ideal album to listen to whilst reading this book.
Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Satre are probably the central figures of the story but so many other people are there and works of literature, film, and art are created and feted. It is a story of sex and love, of anger and argument and of creation and the struggle to create. There are lots of Americans. There's Existentialism - and I'd definitely recommend reading Sarah Bakewell's 'At the Existentialist Cafe after you've read this but I think I'd start with this book - and its influences. The book also talks about de Beauvoir's 'The Second Sex' and its impact. Not everyone comes out of it well. There's a lot of carelessness with the hearts of others. And Arthur Koestler is an utter prick, even if he wrote one great book - 'Darkness at Noon' - and his long term girlfriend and briefly wife Mamaine deserves some kind of belated acknowledgement for her role in not just his life but in his work too. These aren't all nice people, despite their work.
It's made Paris 1947-49 my go-to location for 'where I would go if I had a TARDIS' now. It provides you with a list of people whose books you want to read, whose art you want to discover, whose music you want to listen to and whose films you want to see. It makes you want to sit in cafes, drinking coffee and red wine and talking about art and love and life.
Highly recommended. Give it a read.
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