PARIS DREAMBOOK: An Unconventional Guide to the Splendor and Squalor of the City

by Lawrence Osborne ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1991

Visionary, original, surreal, and densely overwritten dreamguide to present--day Paris, by the novelist of Ania Malina (1987). Without question Osborne has a great idea here, but the curious reader must be a connoisseur of fleeting and vagrant Parisian imagery to get past his language and sift out the gems. . .much like enjoying a braille of ibises and jackals chiseled onto a moonlit Egyptian sarcophagus. On the Metro: ""Of course, the traveller in search of some decent oneiric activity can only choose the Porte de Clignancourt line, which he can join at Odeon and which takes him through landscapes of convulsive disobedience. The trip may begin anodynely enough, but soon an equinoctial disequilibrium enters the carriages with the influx of barbarism associated with Les Halles and reaches a climax of disorder between Etienne Marcel and Barbes."" All right, what do you make of that? Among other things, probably, that it could be said more simply and to stronger effect while still keeping a dreamflavor. We go from an opening vision of Paris flooded as the sewers disgorge and chemical gunk rises to the top of the Eiffel Tower, to the ""Futuropolis,"" or ""Re-invention of the City,"" where man is a cockroach ""attended to by state-sponsored pest controllers, nutritionists, environmentalists, insect lobbyists and of course nuclear engineers: for, as is well-known, the noble cockroach is the only animal that can effortlessly survive lethal doses of radioactivity."" We fight our heartburn and--along with Osborne--feel we must quote the hotel proprietor chasing the thief in Rene Clair's Le Millionaire: ""Con-man! Thief! Fraud! Bastard!. . .Artist!

Pub Date: April 1, 1991

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991

Categories: NONFICTION