Book Review: "Paris" by Julian Green

“Paris is a city that might well be spoken of in the plural, as the Greeks used to speak of Athens, for there are many Parises, and the tourists’ Paris is only superficially related to the Paris of the Parisians. The foreigner driving through Paris from one museum to another is quite oblivious to the presence of a world he brushes past without seeing. Until you have wasted time in a city, you cannot pretend to know it well. The soul of a big city is not to be grasped so easily; in order to make contact with it, you have to have been bored, you have to have suffered a bit in those places that contain it. Anyone can get hold of a guide and tick off all the monuments, but within the very confines of of Paris there is another city as difficult to access as Timbuktu once was.”

- Paris by Julian Green

I do not normally like books about walking around France and there are many of them - mainly because I do not find France nearly interesting enough to write a travel book about. This is something slightly different, it is a man who complains incessantly about Paris whilst also stating that nobody really knows it apart from Parisians. Fair enough. But the first time I read this book, I was in university and honestly, it seemed much better back then. The more you read it and the older you get the worse the book becomes. It is a badly written mess of cliché and hypocrisy which manages to become entangled with its own self-indulgence. The writer is a messy writer at that - he can never really say what he's trying to say and so it becomes all swings and roundabouts.

Before you know it, you are no more involved in Paris than the time where you weren't before you read the book. The total boredom of reading this book is hard to sum up. Is it because it is about Paris from a writer's view (which every writer and their pet dog has spoken about ad nauseam)? Is it because it is about Paris, France (which is a city I'm wholly not interested in apart from the revolutionary era)? Or is it because the writing only appeals to 20-something wannabe bohemians (which let's admit it, is always awful at best)?

Well, first of all amongst the books written about Paris, it is entirely forgettable because of the writing style. Cliché and more than often droning on and on, Julian Green's writing is not anything view interesting and doesn't offer any controversial insight. 'Parisian Sketches' by JK Huysmans would have been a better selection if you wanted to read something well written and filled with metaphor about this city. But honestly, Julian Green's writing is only one of the things I did not enjoy.

Next there is the question of whether this topic has been done to death. Even by the time that Julian Green wrote this book there was already plenty of books about walking around in Paris and nearly all of them were better than this. It feels too easy to read and there is not enough to think about. There are apparent musings that are supposed to feel deep and intense but end up just sounding very matter-of-fact. It's underwhelming at best. In 'The Uncommercial Traveller' by Charles Dickens (Chapter 7 on the Paris Morgue, in fact) there is far more to learn and ponder on.

Finally there is the problem of Paris not being interesting enough to write something like this on. Personally, I would like someone to write something like this on Marrakesh or Cairo, or even somewhere in the Alps, Sweden or other places which remain to be inspiration for great writers but many wannabe bohemians don't seem to like. Perhaps we will see better writing from them. The book 'In Patagonia' is still a great novel by Bruce Chatwin which tells the story of going to South America. Hyper-interesting and deep with provocative and ponderous thoughts, it serves to be a better piece of writing than writing about the place that has been written about two billion times before - most saying the same thing.

Paris is nothing special. Not in my opinion. I think there are better travel books to read than this one also because it is not well-written. It doesn't make you sit and think about the city and with all the droning musing thoughts that seem to randomly enter, it doesn't really let you picture the city very much either. I somehow knew that reading it again would ruin it for me but here we are.