The Book Lover's Guide to Paris: Les Deux Magots

The Book Lover's Guide to Paris

Secret # 2

This weekend my lovely brother and sister came to visit  me in Paris, and top of my "To Do" list was going to the famous "Les Deux Magots" Café on the Boulevard St. Germain. The street is the crowning glory of Baron Haussmann's restructuring of Paris' Left Bank. Famous from the 1930s for its flowering café culture, bars and nightclubs have blinked merrily along the boulevard every night, until its heyday in the 1960s. 

             

Becoming the centre of Existentialist thought, Jean-Paul Sartre famously frequented "Les Deux Magots" with Simone de Beauvoir, Ernest Hemingway, Albert Camus et al. in tow. It was here that Picasso met his muse, and philosophers, authors and musicians all found their intellectual and spiritual home, spilling over into "Café de Flore" next door. 

I feel that the café can and will survive on reputation alone, so it was without embarrassment that the waiter told us that first thing on the weekend they had no 'pain aux raisins' or 'pain au chocolat' left. We made do with warm baguette and some nice toasted brioche but expect a small coffee to set you back €5.60! The atmosphere was nice, but unless you are keen on the authors in whose reputation "Les Deux Magots" basks, I'd take your custom elsewhere. If you are a die-hard fan, there is a gift shop downstairs with "Les Deux Magots" branded mugs, plates, notebooks etc.

"Les Deux Magots" is named for the two Chinese figurines who sit proudly inside.

 

If I returned, I'd be tempted to try Café de Flore next door - for now I'm content to soak up the culture and the history created by these literary icons as I stroll by.

Book Lover's Guide to Paris

I'm a Londoner, born and bred, and completely in love with my city. However, my recent move to Paris has given me a thousand new streets to explore, which I seem to patter down feeling as though I'm the first to set foot upon the time-worn pavés beneath my feet.

Despite this outrageous belief that I must be the first to discover a monument, café or shop - I was brought to a sharp realisation that I tread the same roads as millions before me when I happened across "Les Deux Magots" and the "Café de Flore" on the Boulevard St. Germain. No, I was not the first to admire the cute little brasseries sat alongside this Haussmannian left-bank avenue - Salvador Dalí, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Ernest Hemingway, Oscar Wilde, André Breton and Verlaine had all sat, mused, drank, pondered and yes, walked these streets before me. I felt a chill of excitement, and practically waltzed home, determined to unearth Paris' other literary gems. When I uncover them, I'll share them here in a series called:

The Book Lover's Guide to Paris

Secret # 1 

1) The Shakespeare & Company Bookshop

I felt a complete sense of wonder the first time I happened upon this bookstore by The Seine, with its fairy lights strung up outside, blinking invitingly. I'm sure it's designed so that each new customer feels like an undiscovered genius, as you are invited to use the upright piano, typewriters and desks in the rickety upstairs rooms. I sat down to a typewriter without paper or ribbon, tapped uselessly at the keys, and felt like Jack Kerouac. The bookstore is stocked with classics, with 'The Great Gatsby' being one of their best selling novels. The staff are all English speaking, and have suitably romantic stories - returning to Paris after spending a year here & hoping never to leave. 

     

They hold events in the evenings and a tea party every Sunday. You'll have to arrive early as this bookstore is one of Paris' worst kept secrets, and on the evening I tried to attend it was completely filled. The Wikipedia page does a great job of explaining its origins & some of the shop's most distinguished visitors. The secret to getting a coveted job here is apparently a lot of volunteering at the shop & a big sprinkling of luck. Some sleep in the rooms above, and George Whitman, the original owner of this incarnation of the shop reckoned that as many as 40,000 have rested their heads here over the years.*

It is definitely worth a visit!

You'll find it here - nearest Metro is Saint-Michel, nearest RER is Saint-Michel Notre-Dame

*(according to Mercer writing for the Guardian)

Mansfield Park - Jane Austen

Mansfield Park - Jane Austen

"What became of Miss Austen?" we might ask, echoing the critic Kingsley Amis, when confronted with 'Mansfield Park''s heroine Fanny Price. Compared to the sparkling Elizabeth Bennet whose opinions were voiced loudly enough to resonate with a still captivated 21st Century audience, Fanny is a little limp, underwhelming, or as Austen's mother put it so marvellously herself, 'insipid'. 

Brought into her cousins' household at Mansfield Park as a gesture of insincere benevolence towards Fanny's impoverished mother, Fanny's lack of pizzaz can perhaps be explained by the absence of warmth from her adoptive family. The novel is accurately named, as life is neatly contained by the imposing walls of the Mansfield Park estate. Guests pass each other on their way into and out of its doors like players upon a stage - and only when outside influences threaten the estate's moral superiority and stability does trouble ensue. The theatrical metaphor is entirely appropriate, as it is when Fanny's uncle Sir Thomas leaves to manage the trouble brewing on his Antiguan plantations (which fund life at Mansfield Park) that the outrageous production of 'Lover's Vows' is allowed to go ahead. Taking her cue from love interest and cousin Edmund, Fanny's sense of decorum is threatened the wild flirtation and inappropriate behaviour that will go unrestrained behind behind the theatre's closed curtain.  

Adultery is rarely a theme for Austen's novels, but at Mansfield Park it takes centre stage (ok, I promise I'll stop with histrionic puns). All manner of characters mingle here, from the deliciously annoying Mrs Norris* whose character retains vestiges of that perfect Austenian cynicism and wit, to the charming Mary Crawford whose enticing modernity, looser morals and cosmopolitan lifestyle soon catch Edmund's eye.

Enthusiasm is helpful on the part of the reader to engage with the plot's revelations and twists, which could otherwise be a little underwhelming for the modern audience for whom there is nothing new under the sun.

The novel is offers more in the way of material for literary analysis than the promise of a thrilling read, with issues such as colonialism, slavery, morality and the threat of modernity all brought to the fore. With a little imagination, critics from Virginia Woolf to Edward Said have drawn out some interesting comparisons and suggestions - not all of them immediately evident from Austen's prose. Later work has added to these lines of analysis such as Patricia Rozema's 1999 adaptation of Mansfield Park, which sets the tone of post-colonial critique with a slave-ship moored offshore in the opening scene.

My verdict: Claire Tomalin has it right when she reflects the ambivalence that many readers feel towards Fanny: "More is made of Fanny Price's faith, which gives her the courage to resist what she thinks is wrong; it also makes her intolerant of sinners, whom she is ready to cast aside." Modern sensibilities noted, I still feel that if only Fanny were a more captivating heroine, I would much prefer the novel. Even Austen's mum agreed!

*Yes, J.K. Rowling did name Filch's cat after Fanny's insufferable aunt.

The Road - Cormac McCarthy

The Road - Cormac McCarthy

'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy is not a book for Grandmas. Not my Grandma anyway. I was reading it on a car journey, and before long she had taken it out of my hands and asked to borrow it. She's a magpie so it's a little miracle that she did ask me - my copy of 'The Great Gatsby' had already mysteriously turned up in her house. I'm sorry to say that I firmly refused. The novel is many things: incredible, harrowing, thought-provoking, and unsettling…but appealing for Grandmas it is not.

McCarthy's magnificent imagination sees the American continent reduced to a husk of our present day USA, after an unspecified disaster which wipes out much of mankind. The unforgiving and sinister post-Apocalyptic landscape, though so far from the skyscrapers and shopping malls of the privileged West of today, is completely believable. This is a work of fiction, but it is as though McCarthy has only had to stretch a few years into the future towards which we are all inevitably headed. Therein lies its power. The unspecified nature of the attack, the disorienting lack of geographical landmarks and the nameless protagonists make this story take the form of an a terrifyingly accurate window into the future of the Everyman, woman and child.

Though anonymous, the main characters of 'the man' and 'the boy' are completely captivating. Father and son, they could be anyone - and yet their incisive, sparse dialogue conveys such emotion that many readers have been, and will be, brought to tears. Their relationship is about as convincingly real as any I've read and the boy is childlike without proving annoying. Their familiarity breeds conversations which tend to loop and circle back around the same ideas; the boy is especially worried that they should, whilst fighting to survive in a hostile land, remain 'the good guys'. 

As the novel progresses, fixed notions of 'good' and 'bad' become a little crooked, a little unhinged. The only rules that seem to remain are 'steal to survive' and 'kill or be killed'. There are a few scenes invested with such power as to be heartbreaking: every time the son is left with a revolver and instructions on how to commit suicide if anyone should approach him; and a scene where the 'good guy' status of the man (which the reader has been counting on almost as much as the boy) is blurred. You come to realise that there are no heroes here - the anonymity of the man and child ensures no eponymous legend will be born from this tale. 

 In 2007, the novel was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for fiction - what can I do but give it 5 stars!?

My verdict: It's so good! I wish I'd read this before taking my Literary Criticism exam at university, as this novel would make a perfect study for the emerging field of Ecocriticism. There is so much to say about this novel's startling vision of a world thrown 100 years into an unrecognisable future.