– I received a free copy in exchange for an honest review. –
To be published by St. Martin’s Press on 21 Feb 2017
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‘Flâneuse [flanne-euhze], noun, from the French. Feminine form of flâneur [flanne-euhr], an idler, a dawdling observer, usually found in cities.
That is an imaginary definition.’
If the word flâneur conjures up visions of Baudelaire, boulevards and bohemia – then what exactly is a flâneuse?
In this gloriously provocative and celebratory book, Lauren Elkin defines her as ‘a determined resourceful woman keenly attuned to the creative potential of the city, and the liberating possibilities of a good walk’. Part cultural meander, part memoir, Flâneuse traces the relationship between the city and creativity through a journey that begins in New York and moves us to Paris, via Venice, Tokyo and London, exploring along the way the paths taken by the flâneuses who have lived and walked in those cities.
From nineteenth-century novelist George Sand to artist Sophie Calle, from war correspondent Martha Gellhorn to film-maker Agnes Varda, Flâneuse considers what is at stake when a certain kind of light-footed woman encounters the city and changes her life, one step at a time.
I chose this book because…
As a linguist, I find the history of how a word comes into being interesting, and especially that of a word that has to do with travel, women, and creatives. Also I’m completely in love with this cover, from the illustration to the typography. I’d totally get a poster of this.
Upon reading it…
The approach to this word was not linguistic, but more like sociology or urban studies (or Growth and Structure of Cities, as we like to call it at Bryn Mawr College) or history. Of course, I was looking forward to a linguistic perspective, but I have taken both sociology and cities courses in college so I found those approaches interesting too, and you might as well.
If you’re into history, into writers and creatives, and into their histories, this could be a book for you. The book focused very specifically on various writers that I personally didn’t feel particularly invested in, which is probably why I found the book slow at times and very history-textbook-ish, but I think that may just be because I’m interested in different topics–the writing itself is fine. Oh, and some knowledge of the French language may also add some extra charm to the book for you.
This book is very much about the journey. And I’d like to think that I’m a person who would appreciate that to the fullest in all aspects of life, but I actually found many parts of the book too slow for my taste. The parts that were more up my speed were the parts towards the end of each chapter, and also the epilogue. If you give this book a try and can’t get into it because you feel the same as me about the pace of the narrative, and you want to put the book down, I’d suggest at least skipping to the epilogue before putting the book away. There’s some interesting stuff there! (I could read a whole critique on that last photograph!)
★★★☆☆
Perhaps the answer is not to attempt to make a woman fit a masculine concept, but to redefine the concept itself.
Walking is mapping with your feet.
The city is life itself.
Being able to walk anywhere she liked was empowering enough, but to do it in the beauty of Paris was a gift.
Twenty years old is like forty, that way. The person we’re losing always feels like the last person who’ll want us. We’re always staring off the edge of the cliff, even before the lined face and the grey hair. It’s just that when we’re twenty, we can’t imagine how much more desperate things can get.
I can’t narrow the distance between where I am and where I need to be because I’m not where the map thinks I am. But what if I’m not where I think I am?
Things change and we have to change with them.
We have to rebuild a world from the rustle of paper. Or we could put on our shoes and go out the door.
Looking over their city, Parisians tend to write more about what’s disappeared than what’s still visible.
Traces of the past city are, somehow, traces of the selves we might once have been.
Slow down: it’s the only way to guarantee your immortality.
And yet on some streets you could forget all that, places so beautiful it’s as if no conflict has ever touched them.
Was this spot on the earth beautiful always?
I’m a tourist but I like to think I’m the good kind. I’m here to observe the city, instead of buying bits and pieces of it. As a ‘good tourist’ I hope the city will open itself up to me, if only a little. I hope to find places to be in, to eat in and drink in, that will feel unique and worthwhile. I hope the food will taste good, and the drinks.
When you’re young, when you have so many choices, how can you decide among them? Each one is a narrowing. You want someone to tell you where to go, what to do. Please take from me this responsibility for my own life, that I didn’t ask for and don’t know what to do with. Put me somewhere.
But Venice is not a city you approach with an itinerary: you are certain to get lost, and to be late almost before you’ve set out.
Some people don’t like being followed. Does it come with too much responsibility?
Life was exhausted in me, I was walking in fear of falling down.
We need the mass movements, we need people to get together and march, or even just stand in one place, not only for those in power to see what the people want, but for people who are decidedly not empowered to see you out there, and to shift, just a little bit, the pebbles of thought in their minds. The protest is not only to show the government that you disagree, but to show your fellow citizens–even the smallest ones–that official policies can and should be disagreed with. To provoke a change. To disrupt easy assumptions. You show yourself. You toss in your chips. You walk.
But she stayed behind no lines; she cut across all perspectives.
We were everybody, we were everything. We were an entire city of opinions. We argued with each other along the route, and in the cafes, and when we went home that night. The key is to keep arguing.
Official gatherings were forbidden. There was no march. But we found each other, and held each other, in the square. One day this will all be a memory. And one day beyond that it will be a plaque. And one day they’ll all walk past it, with something else to protest, or prove, and maybe they will think of us.
She started out as a photographer, and this is how she got into cinema: images spoke so loudly she had to give them words.
These places that we take into ourselves and make part of us, so that we are made of all the places we’ve loved, or of all the places where we’ve changed. We pick up bits and pieces from each of them, and hold them all in ourselves.
Fact and fiction were both indispensable ways of seeing.
You can be killed at home as easily as anywhere else–you are not safer at home with your things around you than you are out in the unfamiliar world, though–to paraphrase her first husband–it is pretty to think so.
She decided when and how she would ‘leave’. As if death were just another place to go.
We were all high on the same feelings of possibility.
We can go anywhere. We can do anything, we told each other.
But then wasn’t every country in the world formed out of conflict over who owned the land? All of human history is a story of migrations and conquests. All of us are exiles, but some of us are more aware of it than others.
Space is not neutral. Space is a feminist issue. The space we occupy–here, in the city, we city dwellers–is constantly remade and unmade, constructed and wondered at.