They are almost entirely North African or Tamil.īy Louis-Ferdinand Céline (translated by Ralph Manheim) Read People work very long, hard hours and are poorly paid and now they are almost entirely non-French. My experience, as someone who has done a lot of reporting on food and restaurants, is that that scene has improved but it is still pretty gritty. They worked horrific hours – 16, 17, 18-hour days – and they had no energy to do anything but to work and sleep. He describes how people were basically wage slaves. There is a long section about working as a dishwasher in a restaurant and it really shows the grimness and filth of that life. It was refreshing to me and I think it still is.īut Orwell’s book doesn’t just show the artistic side of Paris. Whereas in the culture I come from in America you are largely measured on how much money you earn, the neighbourhood you live in and the kind of car you drive. Your status is actually perfectly high in society and you are not necessarily measured on your material success, how many books you sell, how much your paintings sell for – that sort of thing. One of the great things about Paris, then as now, is that if you are a writer or an artist or indeed a creator of any kind you are respected. It is a place that you can come to and when here convince yourself that you too might be able to become the person you wanted to be, or you could at least try to. Paris for them is the same city that it was for Orwell and that it was for me. There are also many British people over here and also South Americans, Africans and Italians. Oh, absolutely very much so, especially Americans. Are people still trying to replicate that even today? That is interesting, because when I think of Paris I think of that amazing artistic scene with people like Hemingway, Picasso and Chanel. I also discovered that the Paris Orwell knew in the 1920s and early 1930s was very much still alive in the 1970s and in many ways is still alive today. I didn’t imagine before coming here that Paris had a very gritty real underside. I knew that America had a very tough side to it. I knew about an underworld in America, because I grew up in big cities like San Francisco, and lived in New York. Reading Orwell’s book suggested to me that there was a Paris underworld. I knew Rome very well and other European cities and when I spent time in Paris I thought it was an awful lot more modern and tame than I expected. I had been to Paris in the 1970s and I was fascinated by the city but slightly underwhelmed. That is a book I read when I was young – in my teens – and it really marked me. First up on your list is Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell. Let’s look at some of your book choices, which show these different elements of Paris. The road was named Rue du Figuier in the 13th century, she ordered the tree chopped down in the early 1600s and the road is still called Rue du Figuier today. The road still bears the name of the fig tree.
DR DAVID DOWNIE MOVIE
Somehow I missed the movie and I realised that there is a place that I walk by just about every day and she lived there for some years and got up to a lot of naughtiness that caused the death of at least two men! She also caused a 400-year-old fig tree to be chopped down. I recently was reading about the Reine Margot who was married to King Henry IV and I knew very little about her. I find some chapter of history that I didn’t know at all.
I open a book that I have read or looked at over and over and I find something new. I walk down a street that I have walked down a hundred times and I look up and I see an artist’s studio perched on top of a 17th century building. Tell me something new that you have found out recently about Paris. You constantly find new things out about your partner. It is sort of like a long-running love affair or being married for a long time. There is a real life here of the Parisians and of transplanted people like me who have become in a way Parisian. You find out that in many ways Paris is one of a kind but is also like many other big cities. When you live here as long as I have and you become French – I am a dual national – you learn things about the city that most people don’t realise. Everything and its opposite, I would say. But for someone like you, who has lived there for many years, what kind of images spring to mind when you think of Paris?Ĭrowds, cabbages, cleaning fluids – and of course wonderful walks and beautiful parks and museums with fabulous collections. Paris conjures up so many clichés – the city of romance, a picnic under the Eiffel Tower. Foreign Policy & International Relations.
0 kommentar(er)
