Paris continues to enchant American writers, from Ernest Hemingway through Adam Gopnik. Now add David Downie to the list of ex-pat scribes who have produced memorable work about the lustrous City of Light.
Downie’s new “Paris, Paris” (Transatlantic, 248 pages, $18.95) has even earned a remarkable accolade from vet travel-writing legend Jan Morris, who describes the book as “the most evocative American book about Paris since (Hemingway’s) `A Moveable Feast.”‘
Downie, 47, was educated at Berkeley and Brown and has lived in Paris since 1986. He had only his high school French to draw upon when he moved there from Italy, drawn by the chance to write a novel in a maid’s room.
“I was an usher at the San Francisco Opera and saw `La Boheme’ probably 15 times,” Downie said recently, “so I couldn’t resist writing in a maid’s room.”
Downie soon fell in love in Paris and married a Frenchwoman.
Downie’s novel was never published and now resides in a desk drawer, but the writer’s reflections on his adopted city have been published in newspapers and magazines around the globe.
The delightful and insightful essays in “Paris, Paris” meld history, atmosphere and observations on Paris places, Paris people and Paris phenomena.
Of the Ile de la Cite, that timeless island in the Seine that includes Notre Dame cathedral, Downie writes, “There are benches shaded by sycamores and weeping willows, lazy anglers of uneatable bottom fish, sunbathers and moon gazers, picnickers and pairs of lovers tangled atop crumbling parapets.”
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