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"Edmund White, one of our most celebrated writers, and the French artist Hubert Sorin offer us a lighthearted, gently satiric portrait of their favorite people and places in and around their neighborhood, the run-down heart of Paris called the Chatelet. It is an enchantingly varied world, populated not only by dazzling literati and ultra-chic couturiers and art dealers but also by poetic shopkeepers, grandmotherly prostitutes, and, ever underfoot, an irrepressible basset hound named Fred. The foibles and eccentricities of these sometimes outrageous, always memorable individuals are brought to life with unfailing wit and affection." "Below the surface of this sparkling comedy there is a tragic undercurrent, for while Sorin was completing his work, he was nearing the end of his struggle with AIDS. The book is a tribute to the brave spirit that led the authors to banish the somber and to celebrate the pleasures of their life together, as well as the differences between them."--Jacket.… (more)
User reviews
A delightful book about White and Sorin's life in Paris, with an inevitable undercurrent of sadness, because Sorin is dying. Yet his
Here you will meet all sorts of interesting people. The concierge, Madame Denise, and the coiffeuse who tries out all the latest hairstyles on her. Father Pierre Riches, the "kind and elegant" Catholic priest whose hair had been stroked by Cavafy and whose photograph had been taken by Mapplethorpe. Billy Boy, the jewelry designer with 16,000 Barbies (who, tiring of them, invents a doll called Mdvany, a trendy Parisienne who "will not have unlined skirts like certain dolls we could name . . .". Pierre Guyotat, who wrote in a "strange subvocal language of his own devising, one that omitted vowels among other unnecessary luxuries."
And the places in Paris! How nice to live above a bookstore, especially one that revels in the splendidly punny name, Mona Lisait. To write at the Café Beaubourg, where the waiters will be equally attentive to you and your dog, and where the "tabletops were all painted by celebrated French artists but not signed lest they be stolen." To wander the Marais with its delicatessens and seventeenth-century townhouses, its "Kiki Boys" and dogwalkers.
If you can't go to Paris (and even if you can), you can read this book.