Paris insolite

by Jean-Paul Clébert, Patrice Molinard

Jean-Paul Clébert a fait de ses vagabondages dans le Paris des années 50 des voyages épiques et sensibles. Compagnon de Doisneau, clochard, il nous promène au hasard de ses besoins (dormir... manger... faire l'amour), de ses rencontres et de ses mille petits boulots. Paris insolite est le journal de bord de ces traversées, dans une ville qui " change de peau tous les jours ". Claque littéraire hors norme, ce livre est accompagné de 115 photographies de Patrice Molinard, qui n'avaient connu qu'une édition, il y a 50 ans.

Genres: Nonfiction, France, Memoir, Travel, Biography, Literature, 20th Century

340 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1952

Reviews

[Tristan · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Truth is stranger than fiction, we say. And this holds good in Paris as much as anywhere. The city is obviously a realm of the offbeat. What can you say about a clochard with a monocle pushing a wheelbarrow? Or a whore walking the street with a dog on a leash? Another soliciting in cock-of-the-crock orange shorts? A bistro in Grenelle patronized by Russians and Arabs, an impossible combination which the owner handles by drawing a chalk line on the floor to keep the two groups apart? A café frequented exclusively by the deaf and dumb? A barge named Gérard the Nerval? A beautiful Negress who lives in the crate-return depository in Les Halles and fixes her face every hundred meters using her reflection in the gutter?”


As someone who finds himself moving inexorably closer to his thirties, my naturally melancholic mind lately has turned its attention – quite unbidden – to the concept of transience. Not that of the corporeal variety, I assure you (my firm stoicism doesn’t allow me to revolt in vain against the mutability of human flesh ), but the one that has beset those obscurantist, often lowly and seedy microcosms and humanoid ecosystems that are both spatially and temporally out of reach. Time, after all, stands still for no man, and is equally as unforgiving to the very spaces man inhabits. Actually visiting them, us melancholics mournfully have to admit to ourselves, is a distinct impossibility. Glimpses is all I or most everyone else will ever catch of them.



Now, in this age of audiovisual recording technology available to almost everyone for democratic prices, subcultures and new cultural movements are kept track of from almost the exact moment they spring into existence. Colorful characters are noticed, written about, photographed, and bustling, hip venues or area's are captured on film, after which everything is circulated on the Web, to be perused freely whenever by whomever.

In stark contrast, more than 50 year-old, now dead subcultures like the one postwar Paris had are infamous for having left little behind to remind posterity of them ever having existed, aside from a few faint echo’s and minute, difficult to detect visual clues. Written records, you say? Precious little, I'm afraid. The penning down of extensive, in-depth treatises of the dark, grubby underside of a city populated by its motley crew of losers, rejects, oddballs, crooks, mentally ill, drunks, bons vivants, eccentrics, mystics, vagrants, prostitutes is rarely -at least back then- ever bothered with by those historians cloistered in the groves of academe. Little prestige would be bestowed on them by doing so.



And nor (with some exceptions) should they even attempt it, for who else can authentically relate that life than someone who has actually lived it, experienced the various hardships, has gotten soused, laughed and wept with his fellow compatriots of the lowest rungs of society? Jean-Paul Clébert has done exactly that, and the result is a marvellous feat on accord of its evocative, almost stream of consciousness-like richness of prose and tantalising, ever surprising joy of discovery. Clébert bares much while neglecting very little. This is his – and that of countless others- classic, unvarnished tale of privation, occasional pleasures, titillations (so, so much titillation!) and a life navigated on the perilous fringes of society.

Composed as a string of short, impressionistic vignettes, Paris Vagabond does its utmost to explore every nook and cranny of the Paris Clébert knows and loves. There is a frenetic urgency to his writing, as if the locales and characters he sketches are slowly being atomised and scattered to the wind before his eyes. If one is forced to determine an antagonist in this work, it is Time itself. Time, the great ravager.



Yet, within that very brief span of time available to him before oblivion, Clébert sympathetically and frankly- yet without any moral judgment - immortalises his Paris and the rich assortment of people he knew. Aided by the striking black & white photography of Patrice Molinard - this illustrated edition was published two years after its intitial publication in 1952 and is here lovingly reproduced by NYRB - Paris Vagabond forms a kind of celebratory monument to a time long past, and never to be regained.

However, in the reader's mind it is recreated, if imperfectly. So, in a sense, this Paris still does exist, and is preserved for posterity. The wonders that are our common human creativity and imagination have seen to that - and hopefully will be for a long time to come.

A deeply humanist historical document that is not to be missed. Vive la vie bohème.

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not since reading George Orwell getting all down and out in Paris have I encountered such destitution in this city. He got a nice makeshift pillow that felt like one was resting their head on a block of wood, whereas for Clébert here it's a sack of spuds. He doesn't actually become a certified tramp until about halfway through this book, but the whole experience of him chronicling himself and those whose basic lifestyle is to survive on no money at all, along with photographs capturing all the squalor by French director/writer Patrice Molinard that are interspersed throughout the text makes one's own abode suddenly feel more like a palace. He describes a city that hadn't changed much since the occupation - obviously minus the Nazis, and even makes comparisons to the Surrealist period pre-war. And there are all kinds of folk here; from the penniless bohemian youths of the Left Bank to the old toothless winos coughing up their lungs and wearing shoes shot to hell. Knowing certain areas of Paris like I do helped when it came to navigating the mental picture I had in my head - districts, streets, etc..., but having not even been there I still would have found this such a fascinating read. Despite the overwhelming hunger and noisy bellies, it always seems to be the same case of cigarettes take priority over food, and drink over a place to get one's head down. There are those literally asleep on the pavement when the cops aren't around. What I found great was the fact that Clébert was somehow still leading a full and pleasurable life whilst roaming around living hand to mouth, giving the text a surprisingly cheery feel at times. There was something quite sweet about making love to a wench in his den near a railway and taking defensive measures to stop them both rolling down the steep embankment onto the tracks. Another worthy and little known NYRB Classic that will now sit nicely along side many others.

[Tosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Luc Sante with his "The Other Paris" wrote one of the two ultimate books on that beloved city. He also wrote an introduction to the other essential book on the French capital that is by Jean-Paul Clébert called "Paris Vagabond." Like "The Other Paris" this book reeks of the underclass or the belly of Parisian culture, with its homeless, drunks, criminals, streetwalkers, and everything between. Encouraged by Blaise Cendrars, Clébert wrote the ultimate book in early 1950s on the culture that was not celebrated by overseas tourists in Paris. Wandering from one neighborhood to the next, Clébert recorded with a pen or pencil on newsprint, wrote about those who fell or lived in the cracks of Paris. Impressionistic as well as documentation he covers the waterfront that to some, is pure hell. Yet, it is virtually a Jean Genet love of the squalor and dirt of the Parisian underworld. Throughout the book it is illustrated with photographs by Patrice Molinard, who begin his career taking images for Georges Franju's documentary "Le sang des bêtes." His aesthetic or documentation fits perfectly with Clébert's realistic poetic prose. A superb translation by Donald Nicholson-Smith, this is the book on Paris. A total classic.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

It does not surprise me that in France, even the hobos are intellectual. Jean-Paul Clébert's Paris Vagabond is written by a down-and-out who truly loves Paris and knows just about every inch of it. Granted, what he excels in is places to sleep for the night, bistros with kind-hearted proprietors, and women of easy virtue.

Still, it is interesting to see the City of Lights from such a subterranean point of view. Clébert has written a fascinating book showing us Paris from a different perspective.

[Daniel Polansky]

A transient’s tour of Paris in the years shortly after WWII. If the idea of this appeals to you (it appealed to me) double down on it. Clebert was a real, no shit, homeless dude, and his recollections of slophouses, cheap bars and whores is cleverly, even beautifully written, and are accompanied by a series of haunting and beautiful photos. I really liked it, it made me miss Paris and feel nostalgic period of time long ago where I was, I mean, not a transient obviously but, you know, familiar with a lot of strange characters. Not as strange as the ones documented here but still, I get to be nostalgic about whatever the fuck I want to be, go fuck yourself. Asshole. Fuck you. Keep.

[Alberto · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's great! jean Paul Clebert was a clochard-journalist-poet exploring the hidden endroits of Paris for living. Searching for a piece of food, a place to sleep and a love to get warm with. That's the book Jack Kerouac would have been writing in the fifties if it were european and if h were travelling in Paris instead of the US. This book is a rare pearl cause is a re-edition of the historical legendary edition of the 52 with the photos by Patrice Molinard. Stop reading Hemingway, Miller and all the others, this is the only non-clichè book about La Vie Bohemienne in Paris.

[Kimley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Undoubtedly many of the places mentioned here are now posh high-rent districts but this book makes sure the pungent, sticky residue doesn't disappear completely. Inhale, imbibe and enjoy...

[Dmitry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Picked this up five years ago at The Last Bookstore in LA, thinking to expose myself to something entirely new. This is a book about wandering, urban wandering on zero dollars a day, done right (looking at you, Chatwin). The reason Paris Vagabond captures so well the raw varied essence of the underside of life is that Clebert composed this collection of faces, cityscapes, and bistros, so many bistros (many of which still admitted bums at time of publication in 1952), while fully saturated in the experience of himself living for years as a tramp, a sort of poet tramp, in that vast city. There are plenty of gruesome, sad stories of indigence and suffering, and no shortage of ill-meaning types among the vagrant crowd, but what shines through all of it is the author’s genuine kindness and interest in the lives of even the most downtrodden, and a remarkable ability to not just enjoy but savor life while barely scraping by day to day.

Couple of themes that lowered my enjoyment of this book were the disparaging, hyper-sexualized view of women (the writing is vulgar to the core) and the perpetual focus on boozing. Not that I expect bums to be sober gentlemen (maybe the author I do somewhat), but it is a side of reality I don’t have to like.

---
“Idleness has much to be said for it. As old La Puce (“The Flea”) the ex-con was wont to say, ‘Listen, son. I’ve hit fifty and I’ve never worked in my life, and as you can see I am in perfectly good health. I get drunk in the normal way, and I am properly dressed.’”

[Chrissie]

*********************

Comparable to George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London,
The theme may be the same, but I am curious about the writing. Comparing different author styles is fun.

[Lucie Paris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful and touching!

I like reading about my city and it was a great walk into history and into french culture with someone able to make you feel the world he was seeing and living in. He was right about Paris being experimented early in the morning, in the bistrots/cafés or just by losing yourself in the streets.
Still the best way to discover Paris and its diversity not always full of sparkles.

I was pulled into the desription and the hard and realistic way the author was sharing his testimony of an epoque as well as trying to share his views of Paris. Not sure, it's a book for tourists, who usually prefer the glamorous and romantic view of seeing the French capital. But it's wonderfully written, full of poetry even when relating poverty and the ways clochards were living at this time.

It's also very contemporary. If the landscape have changed because of constructions and if some "quartiers" have disapeared, Paris is still full of awesome surprises and days still "inhaled faster than a puff on a cigarette." And poverty with clochards and migrants is still the same. Probably even more sad and dangerous now.

An awesome book, written by someone who was in love with the French city as well as with the real people he had spent time with. Brillant!

Lucie
http://newbooksonmyselves.blogspot.fr...

[Dvora Treisman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here's a Paris you've probably never seen or read about. It's an interesting tour, of a sort, where you'll be introduced to neighborhoods you don't know or that are no longer the same as they were in the 50s, and people you don't see when you go to visit the museums and the Eiffel Tower. It's down-to-earth, as are the people. My only complaint is that Clebert seems not to have seen any violent people where he was hanging out. He mentions at the end that they exist. They exist in the Maigret books too, but they are always far away and different from the vagabonds, rag-pickers, and drifters -- those who Clebert writes about. The violent ones are gangsters, probably from Marseille. And who knows? Maybe that's true.

And there are photos!

It just so happens that this evening I watched (for the third or fourth time) the episode of the French television Maigret series starring Bruno Cremer titled Maigret et le Clochard. The victim is a tramp who camps out under one of the bridges along the Seine in Paris. I suppose it shouldn't be surprising that there were many details in the scenes that brought to life what Clebert described in his book.

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

Prepare to have your ideas about Paris shattered. Granted, this was written in the 1950s, when Paris was still putting itself back together after World War II. Yet, some of the conditions of the inner back streets and the pre-Peripherique, no-man's Zone were likely squalid and barbarous even before the Nazis invaded. Still, this clochard's-eye view of the city is enlightening and funny, and takes the piss out of the thousands of cliche-gilded reveries that pass for writing about Paris. Beggars still begged, whores still whored, and Les Halles still spewed guts and blood (along with fresh meat and vegetables) out onto the cobbled streets. And between the nooks left when a wooden lean-to did not quite meet a stone building and the shrubberies and barrows of scraggly parks, Clebert shows how a person without a job or home could survive the streets.

[Jenna · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very atmospheric meander through Paris post WWII, which, now that I'm reflecting on it as a whole, well captures a sense of dislocation that I associate with a post-war period - a period of aftermath. This is more about the environment than the people, except as the people contribute to the environment, with the same attention to their details as to the "phantasmagorical" alleys or the shelter provided by an abandon well overgrown with ivy or the play of candle-light in attic rooms full of sleeping vagabonds. Although never referenced directly, I feel an empty space in the narrative created by the end of the war, the lost intensity of resistance, now unable to find a path and a place to lead an examined life in an exhausted and impoverished city. The many many photos contribute to a vivid sense of place and time, seeing the beauty in fatigue and decay that Clébert describes, but also a lack of optimism, an attachment to the city without vibrance or love. "Paris is indeed an extraordinary caravansary for those who know how to live there and see things ... but it is suffocating ... a vast horizon of stone where no dew falls at night." I was glad to learn that Clébert did eventually fine his place, in a country-side artists colony where he was a productive writer. An author with these skills deserves a room of his own.

[Caterina Pierre · Rating 5 out of 5]

Published originally as "Paris insolite" in 1952, Paris Vagabond is a slice of the world of the itinerant wanderer in the years directly after World War II. During the "two or three hundred nights" (p. 314, not "two or three years," as some websites would have you believe) that Jean-Paul Clébert wandered around Paris, embedding himself in the world of the vagabond, he took notes on his experience on any available paper-like surface (toilet paper included), with the hopes that someday he would publish, in no specific order, his reminiscences of his time amongst the most down-trodden in Paris. There he finds the most resilient of characters: people who scrounge for any coin, any item to sell, any corner where they might sleep for a few hours undisturbed. Yet, somehow, most of them by Clébert's account, manage to drink a few liters of wine a day, have a sexual rendezvous here or there (how? considering the smells that the author describes?), and for the most part manage to stay out of jail (one, Célestine, mentioned at the end of the book, tries her best to get jailed, because, well, jails have a bed, food, friends, and a way to make a few bucks a day, which beats the alternative, particularly for women). Prostitutes abound in this book that doesn't really have a plot.
Certain motifs repeat frequently, such as the stalls at the now extinct Les Halles, that glorious fresh food and flower and everything market that originated in the 11th century and which was torn down in 1973. Men playing "belote" were mentioned so many times that I wanted to learn how to play (I looked it up...it's too complicated for my tiny brain). The Zone, also now extinct, was also often referenced. It was a military defense area built in 1844 just outside the city limits, but it gradually filled up with poor people living in shanties, particularly in the first half of the 20th century. By Clébert's time, there were still people living in dire poverty in the Zone, though it was beginning to be cleared away for development. ("Development" meaning the building of pricey housing so as to rid the area of a "menace," that is, the poor. It does not mean development of housing for the poor - It never does.)
The book would have been a great guide as to where to sleep for free, where to store your belongings, where to pick up a meal, or a bed, or a willing girl, at the time when the book was originally published. It's a miracle how anyone stays alive in the book, but we suspect some of the dead dredged up in the Seine mentioned in the book were vagabonds. Where women hid their money was a revelation (any available flap-over of skin would do). I suspect today that while Paris still has its share of vagabonds, the rules and regulations for this sort of thing have changed enormously, as have the street names, as well as the locations of just about every restaurant, flop house, and patch of overgrown weeds mentioned in the book.
The photographs by Patrice Molinard that accompany the book document the many locales and haunts that are mentioned, validating Clébert's text, and illustrating Paris in a way that it is typically not depicted. If you can imagine images that are the complete opposite of those made by Robert Doisneau or Henri Cartier-Bresson, these are those images. But this is not an insult of Molinard's images: he, like Clébert, takes just a bit of the glamour away from Paris, but imbues it instead with a down-to-Earth reality the city often escapes. If I were to do a deluxe edition printing of Paris Vagabond, I would add maps of every area that Clébert mentions, and note name changes and losses as necessary. I sat reading the book often in front of my computer, Googling street names, trying to get an idea of the locales that he and other vagabonds had frequented. Clébert does spend time in my favorite areas of Paris: the Latin Quarter, the Saint-Paul Quarter, and the Rue Mouffetard. If you love Paris, you will love this book, no matter how gritty it is.
Readers should be forewarned that it does contain naughty words, slightly insulting mistreatment of women (primarily ass grabbing and that sort of nonsense from the 50s), and discussions of where vagabonds might do their business. Let it go and just enjoy the book: keep in mind when it was written and all will be well. I enjoyed this book very much and I highly recommend it to anyone who is a Francophile. It's also the partial inspiration for, and a great companion to, Luc Sante's The Other Paris (2015).

[Deborah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read about Paris Vagabond somewhere and put it on my to-read list at the library. When it arrived I noticed the librarian had cataloged it as fiction. Instead, it is the antithesis of the I went to Paris and lived happily every after books I and so many other people read. It is a mostly fascinating account of the clochards, prostitutes, alcoholics, hobos, rag pickers etc who lived in the forgotten corners of Paris in the 50's, and still do live in other forgotten corners of Paris and other cities now. His descriptions of the maid quarters up in the rafters were especially resonant with me since I lived in one for a year in Paris.

After two hundred pages or so it got to be a bit too much - reading his accounts made me feel slightly dirty and ill. The book is much like George Orwell's Down and Out in London and Paris, which describes the same ilk living about twenty years earlier. I read Orwell's book while a student in France and his descriptions had a profound impact on me, most likely since as a poor student I was a bit closer to that lifestyle.

[Alan Asnen · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you’ve ever been to Paris (and I know some of you are saying “I wish...") then you don’t know what you’ve missed. But if you haven’t, you should probably not waste your time on guides but instead read this book first.
Even though it is considered by some to be “out-of-date” by fifty years or more—and yes, in many ways, like most major cities, Paris has “changed” a great deal, map-wise—you would be surprised how “hip” it still is to the intricate ways of the people who still inhabit the place. And if you are interested in the people, not merely the buildings, statues and art, then this is a must-read.
Paris still stinks, in more ways than one, and this book reeks of it, just as Paris has since before Baron Hausmann tried to freshen the air. Unless you go there with a gas mask on (Covid aside) you’ll need some good advice, from someone who has lived on those streets, and M. Clebert is THE man.

[Joshua Hinojosa · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Truth is stranger than fiction, we say. And this holds good in Paris as much as anywhere…I am in Paris. The fact is a blessing in itself.”

Paris is one of my favorite cities, but not for the obvious postcard reasons most people go for (Eiffel Tower, Louvre, etc). What I love is the ability to walk with no direction or plans, and you’ll ultimately find something new. A corner cafe in a quiet neighborhood. A bistro with no open seats by the Seine. A park with a mix of wandering tourists and disgruntled Parisians.

The point of Paris is to have zero plans and find things on your own, and most people make that mistake. This book takes us on a similar approach from a much different angle, one of poverty and survival.

I wanted to like this book a little more for my love of Paris, but the long-winded ramblings became a chore after a while. That’s not to say there weren’t plenty of gems in this one, and curious stories that can only be found in the Parisian underground.

[John Marr · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unlike pretty much everything Luc Sante is associated with, I wasn't blown away by Paris Vagabond. Perhaps it was the long, windy sentences, or maybe just my minimal familiarity with Paris. However, every once in a while, just enough to keep you turning the pages, J-PC knocks one out of the park::

"Lone nocturnal or twilight walkers are all morose, sad drunks, living a dog's life or suffering from a cancer of the face. Instead of necking, couples jerk each other off brutally..."

[Josh Sherman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is way better than Down and Out in Paris and London and is a great example of this specific type of book (think certain Henry Miller titles — but also precursors to so-called "autofiction" etc.

It lags here and there, to me, but enjoyed it lots. Certain parts will stick with me a long time, and they are honestly the more mundane bits. Like how does one go about cleaning themselves in mid-century Paris with no fixed address and none of the social supports we see today?

[Poptartk · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are transcendent moments in this memoir that are among the finest descriptive writing you will ever encounter, but ultimately I found it too repetitive to sustain my interest. I think my approach to reading it may have been misguided, as I read it straight through as I usually do—and I think it might be better read in sections, over time. That would have toned down the repetition and allowed the wonderful passages to stand out more sharply.

[Zoe · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The revelation of the life of a city is not accessible to the public be reserved for initiates, for a very few poets a very many vagabonds. Each individual's perception of that life depends on their temperament and emotional resources, on their particular vision, be it deadened, disgusted, or razor-sharp. The city is inexhaustible. And to master it one must indeed be either a vagabond poet or a poet vagabond." -p.50 (Itineraries)

"Nothing is as horrifying as fishing corpses for the Seine as they drift with the current on the way to better days in another universe. Mistreated and misunderstood kids, girls knocked up and abandoned, the unemployed and maladapted, the nutcases and the obsessed—all those beloved character-types of popular novels whose contemplation attracts rubbernecking readers like so many scatophagic insects battening on fresh shit." -p.104 (Grand Canal)

"Instead of necking, couples jerk each other off brutally, wild-eyed, as though striving for one last climax, never speaking of the future, or of your beautiful breasts, of saying I love your nipples, how big they are, I want you to caress me gently and afterwards take me dancing; instead, they hurl back and forth the age-old stories of getting laid off at the factory, of a period still not come, of that's it, this time I'm in the family way, and of well, my girl, you can see your regular about that, I don't want some whining brat from God knows who, sort it out yourself, I'm going for a drink." -p.105 (Grand Canal)

"Paris by night is a labyrinth where every street opens onto another or onto one of the boulevards so aptly described as arteries—a labyrinth through which I make my way in fits and starts, like a blood clot, jolting down the steepest inclines, emerging from bottlenecks into empty space. And so I go, walking, plunging, flowing—a river hoping somehow to debouch into the sea, haven of peace and freedom from care. But that is impossible, for there are only junctions, intersections, forks, everywhere tributaries, right and left, upstream or down, everywhere identical borders clearly marked and impassive, unaffected by the nagging progression of the streets. I sink into the night like a child's paper boat on a stream, I am tossed this way and that, my ankles are stuck, my legs weaken, give way, hollow out, I lose my footing, all I have left are my arms to move me forward, I am drowning silently, descending in my dream into the parallel watery maze of the sewers that wend their way beneath my own route." -p.128~129 (Hunger)

"A main pole of attraction for someone beset by hunger are the menus posted in restaurant windows; they catch your eye from far away, from the other side of the street, wielding a magnetic power that rivets you to their perusal, to a deliberately slow reading of these veritable poems—pure, living, visceral poetry whose words and expressions speak not to the soul but to the stomach, whose rhythms stimulate not so much the gray matter as the marrow of the bones and the gastric juices, and whose reading aloud, so far from striking chords of illusion, precipitates mouthwatering activity by salivary glands." -p.131 (Hunger)

"Driven mad by his own long exposure to an asocial form of life: the daily, desperate quest for bad food—too much drink offered and too much nourishment withheld—and a carefully nurtured hate for the wealth on display so close by, coupled with the masochism of indigence." -p.136 (Hunger Delusions)

"It was in his honor and at his request that I sacrificed a ton of candles, for like me he loved their flickering flame, so much more alive than that of an electric lamp with its anonymous piped-in source, alive in the swaying of its hips, in the very variability of its liveliness, a world flashes and eclipses, alive in its evanescence, its soothing light not ruffling the eyelids of sleepers but keeping vigil over them, animated by their breath." -p.175~177 (Luc's Place)

"The Shepherd and I embark on the preparation of a cold meal to which various unlikely little creatures invite themselves—spiders, ants, crickets that I cannot contemplate and examine in this corner of the capital without a measure of joy, for their presence is reinvigorating, proving as it does that all is not lost, that primitive life has not yet been utterly eradicated from civilization's universe of stone." -p.198 (Camping Out (in Paris))

"The stove snores, crackles and farts, as complacent as we are as we bask in its warmth." -p.282 (Unknown Bistros)

"What a mute yet vibrant rebirth transforms this city—these streets, sidewalks, houses, lampposts, shady nooks, trees, urinals—once it is no longer covered, as with a skin, as with a crust, by people swarming larvae-like into the great machine of wage-labor—when, with night, it comes back to life, back to the surface, washing off its filth, straightening its back, scrubbing itself down, singing its silent song, lighting up its darkness. It stretches, relaxes, takes its ease, spreads out before me, the solitary walker, the stroller from elsewhere, free to explore its diverse extremities, thrilled to get lost in its labyrinthine immensity, turning at any corner, leaving a boulevard at the first street on the left, returning to the river, crossing it, tripping along, whistling with a cigarette butt between my lips. Darkest night." -p.312 ("I've Had Enough")

[Jenny · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really had to trudge through this book. Maybe if I had spent more time in Paris and new all of the street names and neighborhoods, it would have had more meaning. I just couldn't get over the lack of story, the ugly sex scenes and the incredibly negative portrayal of women. I did like the pictures though.

[Beatrice · Rating 3 out of 5]

Paris as lived.

Clébert showed that even the narrowest corners of hidden alleyways have something to offer. I enjoyed how this book felt like it was lifted straight from his notepads and used paper napkins.

I just did not like the way women here are pictured... I guess that's not surprising given the era it was written and published.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lyrical memories of a bygone Paris of the mind and heart. Quite proto-situ, delightfully droll, though occasionally orientalist (as the time...)

Recommended for fans of Beats or of Orwell's Down and Out in Paris & London.

[Robert Cox · Rating 5 out of 5]

An ode to the underbelly of Paris. Already disappearing in post war Paris, the portrayal of the culture of smalltime hookers, drunks, ragpickers and others invites the reader in and makes them appreciate that world. The photographs illustrating the addition are a gem

[Dan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Will pick this back up when I move to Paris and I can walk the streets that Clebert stalked as a vagabond, but a bit "inside baseball" for me sitting in Washington DC with little knowledge of French/Parisian history and frankly, French culture.

[Gurldoggie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A rambling travelogue of postwar Paris, and a love letter to a way of life that was disappearing under the author’s nose. A vivid and sometimes even joyful description of a hand-to-mouth existence in the darkest corners of the City of Light.

[Camille · Rating 5 out of 5]

Indescriptible mais fascinant "roman aléatoire" !

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not elegant prose but an amazing look at a Paris we will not see. “A vast horizon of stone, where no dew falls at night.”

[David Rullo · Rating 4 out of 5]

A travelogue with virtually no dialogue. A clear forerunner to much beat writing. A must read of modern French literature.