“A Passion for Paris: Romanticism and Romance in the City of Light”
St. Martin’s Press, $26.99
David Downie begins his tale of Paris with a story about a little-known Frenchman named Felix Nadar. Nadar was an early self-taught photographer and, according to Downie, “an unapologetic Romantic.” He is notable for another reason: He decided “one day in 1855 that it was time someone invented aerial photography (ballooning being all the rage at the time) and that he would be the man.” Nadar was a dreamer and a dabbler (he starred in the original cast of “La Boheme” “before it emigrated from Paris garrets to the realm of operatic art”), and he was full of impractical dreams.
The improbable life and nomadic adventures of Nadar inspired other latter-day Romantics, including Downie himself. When Downie first heard of Nadar, he was waiting tables at a French restaurant in the San Francisco Bay area. And when he volunteered as an usher at the San Francisco Opera and saw Puccini’s “La Boheme,” he was smitten by the idea of Paris. One day in spring he finally made it across the Atlantic and moved into his own “opera-set, seventh-floor walk-up cold-water garret” on the Right Bank. It was April in Paris, no less.
Since then Downie has tried to uncover the enigmatic mystery that is Paris. The first stop he made when he arrived was Pere-Lachaise Cemetery. He felt an instant connection as if a part of him “had always been there … as if an alter ego lived a parallel existence.” Before long he began exploring the streets of Montmartre and Montparnasse. He walked in the footsteps of Baudelaire and Flaubert, Victor Hugo and Honore de Balzac. Hemingway is here too, as well as Delacroix and Rimbaud, Stein and Picasso. He tries to define the undefinable: What exactly is Romanticism anyway, he asks?
The historical figure that remains closest to his heart is Henri Murger, author of “Scenes of Bohemian Life,” which was transformed into Puccini’s “La Boheme.” A bust of the sickly Murger (“still a household name in Paris”) is in the Luxembourg Gardens. But it was Nadar himself, Downie says, who served as the model for the male characters in Murger’s enduring story. The short chapter on Montmartre is a perfect encapsulation of the book itself as the author sums up the popular neighborhood’s appeal: part wistful longing, part mindless tourism. To wit: “Montmartre is Bohemia Land Paris with a Main Street worthy of Anaheim.” Downie’s advice? “Forget midnight in Paris. Stroll across Montmartre at dawn.”
Downie’s Paris is not all glossy nostalgia. He also acknowledges Paris’ gritty side, “the wild sides of the City of Light.” Alas, both, he contends, are here to stay: The “nostalgia for a mythical yesteryear” as well as “the phobia of Islam and latent racism.”
“The Fault Line: Traveling the Other Europe From Finland to Ukraine”
Rizzoli, $27.95
Paolo Rumiz has seen war through his own eyes as a correspondent for Italy’s La Repubblica during the conflict-ridden years in the former Yugoslavia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Afghanistan. And so, in “The Fault Line” he travels through the countries of the former Iron Curtain with a clear-eyed perspective, all too familiar with the region’s troubled past as he goes back to “the scene of the crime.” Writing the book, he was aware too that a new Iron Curtain was forming as the revolt in Ukraine exploded “right before my eyes.”
With nothing but a backpack and a pair of shoes, he travels on trains, buses, ferries and barges; hitchhiking too. Indeed, his journey is full of strange and wonderful encounters: a giant-crab fisherman, a reindeer herder, smugglers and coast guard officers, an old woman with three goats on a leash who tells the author of her version of “Genesis,” and a writer who lives “in a solitary house amid the lakes in the wilderness of Karelia.”
It’s a mesmerizing and often poetic journey — suffused with echoes of war — into less-traveled lands.
June Sawyers is a freelance reporter.
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