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Paris vagabond / Jean-Paul Clebert ; photographs by Patrice Molinard ; translated from the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith ; foreword by Luc Sante.

By: Contributor(s): Material type: TextTextLanguage: English Original language: French Series: New York Review Books classicsPublisher: New York : New York Review Books, [2016]Edition: First illustrated editionDescription: xvi, 314 pages : illustrations ; 21 cmContent type:
  • text
Media type:
  • unmediated
Carrier type:
  • volume
ISBN:
  • 9781590179574 (paperback)
  • 1590179579 (paperback)
Uniform titles:
  • Paris insolite. English
Subject(s):
Contents:
Back to the city -- Discovering Paris -- Apartment measurer -- Ambulant newsie -- Itineraries -- Vagabondage -- Saint-Paul neighborhood -- Jewish Quarter -- Rue Quincampoix -- Grand tour of Paris -- Saint-Ouen Fleamarket -- The zone -- By the river in Ivry -- Avenue Eugène-Thomas- -- Cité universitaire -- Grand Canal -- Keeping clean -- Pigalle -- First, eat -- Hunger -- Hunger delusions -- The merits of tea -- Les Halles, belly of Paris -- Pilfering -- "Food! You can't beat it" -- A clochard's paradise -- The Attic of Evil Spells -- Tea ceremony -- Luc's place -- Paris nights -- Station waiting rooms -- Cemetery -- "Make yourself at home" -- Camping out (in Paris) -- Feast day -- A brothel for down-and-outs -- Hospitable bistros -- Maubert -- Baby carriages -- Ragpickers -- Waste paper as a resource -- Wine warehouses of Bercy -- The last guinguettes -- A tattoo market -- Arab bistros -- Dying alone -- Unknown bistros -- Familiar streetwalkers -- A phantasmagorical alleyway -- Vie de bohème -- Idleness has much to be said for it -- Realm of the offbeat -- Sexual perversion -- Real-life Paris -- "I've had enough."
Summary: "Paris Vagabond is an unclassifiable masterpiece, a book that purports to be a novel but, accompanied as it is by the photographs of Patrice Molinard, is as much a brilliant documentary as a work of the imagination. In rich prose, suffused with the language of the street, and brilliantly rendered in English by Donald Nicholson-Smith, Jean-Paul Clebert captures the essence of a long-gone Paris of the poor, the criminal, and the outcast: a society of outsiders beyond the social pale. Clebert's is a genuinely anarchist voice, a free spirit who was an intrepid explorer of a Paris that was in many places practically ruinous but where the poor were not yet completely marginalized. He was also a true writer's writer, hailed by his mentor and friend Blaise Cendrars and admired by Henry Miller, who said that reading Paris Vagabond "roiled my guts.""-- Provided by publisher.
Holdings
Item type Home library Collection Call number Materials specified Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Adult Book Adult Book Main Library NonFiction 914.436 C623 Available 33111008400679
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

An NYRB Classics Original

Jean-Paul Clebert was a boy from a respectable middle-class family who ran away from school, joined the French Resistance, and never looked back. Making his way to Paris at the end of World War II, Clebert took to living on the streets, and in Paris Vagabond , a so-called "aleatory novel" assembled out of sketches he jotted down at the time, he tells what it was like. His "gallery of faces and cityscapes on the road to extinction" is an astonishing depiction of a world apart-a Paris, long since vanished, of the poor, the criminal, and the outcast-and a no less astonishing feat of literary improvisation- Its long looping breathless sentences, streetwise, profane, lyrical, incantatory, are an adventure in their own right. Praised on publication by the great novelist and poet Blaise Cendrars and embraced by the young Situationists as a kind of manual for living off the grid, Paris Vagabond -here published with the starkly striking photographs of Clebert's friend Patrice Molinard-is a raw and celebratory evocation of the life of a city and the underside of life.

Translation of Paris insolite, co-authored with Patrice Molinard (photographs), published by Denoël, 1952, and reissued by Attila in 2009.

Back to the city -- Discovering Paris -- Apartment measurer -- Ambulant newsie -- Itineraries -- Vagabondage -- Saint-Paul neighborhood -- Jewish Quarter -- Rue Quincampoix -- Grand tour of Paris -- Saint-Ouen Fleamarket -- The zone -- By the river in Ivry -- Avenue Eugène-Thomas- -- Cité universitaire -- Grand Canal -- Keeping clean -- Pigalle -- First, eat -- Hunger -- Hunger delusions -- The merits of tea -- Les Halles, belly of Paris -- Pilfering -- "Food! You can't beat it" -- A clochard's paradise -- The Attic of Evil Spells -- Tea ceremony -- Luc's place -- Paris nights -- Station waiting rooms -- Cemetery -- "Make yourself at home" -- Camping out (in Paris) -- Feast day -- A brothel for down-and-outs -- Hospitable bistros -- Maubert -- Baby carriages -- Ragpickers -- Waste paper as a resource -- Wine warehouses of Bercy -- The last guinguettes -- A tattoo market -- Arab bistros -- Dying alone -- Unknown bistros -- Familiar streetwalkers -- A phantasmagorical alleyway -- Vie de bohème -- Idleness has much to be said for it -- Realm of the offbeat -- Sexual perversion -- Real-life Paris -- "I've had enough."

"Paris Vagabond is an unclassifiable masterpiece, a book that purports to be a novel but, accompanied as it is by the photographs of Patrice Molinard, is as much a brilliant documentary as a work of the imagination. In rich prose, suffused with the language of the street, and brilliantly rendered in English by Donald Nicholson-Smith, Jean-Paul Clebert captures the essence of a long-gone Paris of the poor, the criminal, and the outcast: a society of outsiders beyond the social pale. Clebert's is a genuinely anarchist voice, a free spirit who was an intrepid explorer of a Paris that was in many places practically ruinous but where the poor were not yet completely marginalized. He was also a true writer's writer, hailed by his mentor and friend Blaise Cendrars and admired by Henry Miller, who said that reading Paris Vagabond "roiled my guts.""-- Provided by publisher.

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