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Books

Writers will always have Paris

For years, novelists have turned to the City of Lights for inspiration. Here, four new books explore today's multicultural Paris.

By MARGO HAMMOND
Published July 9, 2006

Years ago, when the novelist and poet Andrei Codrescu was contributing a column called La Vie Boheme to a magazine I was editing, he wrote about an illness he called the I Wish I Were in Paris disease. The bug of Parisian nostalgia, he pointed out, was especially contagious in springtime. Codrescu, who was living in Baltimore at the time, concluded the piece by asking wryly: "I wonder if I lived in Paris, would I ever get the 'I Wish I Were in Baltimore' disease?"

Personally, I am especially prone to being struck by Paris fever around Bastille Day. So what if there were only seven prisoners in the Bastille when it was attacked by angry mob of ordinary citizens? The storming of the Bastille in 1789 in defiance of France's overbearing king, celebrated every July 14, has marked Paris forever as the ultimate symbol of freedom.

No wonder the city is where so many novelists have found their muse.

F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ernest Hemingway. Gertrude Stein. James Joyce. Dan Brown. Abha Dawesar. Faiza Guene. Kavita Daswani and Jake Lamar.

Okay, so the latter four are not yet household names, but they are among the most recent authors gobsmacked by Paris. Setting their latest novels (and in Guene's case, her first) near and around the City of Lights, each brings a decidedly multicultural flavor to the classic Parisian landscape. Reading them, you'll never look at Gay Paree quite the same way:

THAT SUMMER IN PARIS by Abha Dawesar (Doubleday, $23.95, 338 pp)

Dawesar, a New Delhi-born Harvard graduate who calls New York, Paris and New Delhi her home, tells the story of an aging Indian author living in New York in this novel, the most literary and sexually explicit of the group.

Prem Rustum hooks up with a young woman because she has evoked his name in her posting on a dating Web site ("Write like Prem Rustum, think like Prem Rustum ... be Prem Rustum"). When Rustum impulsively heads for Paris in order to be close to Maya, who has gone there to write her first novel, he exposes himself to a subject he has been avoiding in his life and his novels: passion.

"The patisserie windows were replete with a range of specialty cakes and tarts to provide for the high flow of customers on Sunday. The colors of the pear and rhubarb pies and the golden ribbons decorating the cakes took Maya back to the pastels in the Musee d'Orsay. Everything in the store was glistening, soft, jellylike, moist, rich, and luscious - the old man behind her was Prem - and the mille-feuille vanille (never called a napoleon in France), with its layers of crisp flaky pastry and sublime yellow vanilla-infused cream, was dying for a lick."

KIFFE KIFFE TOMORROW by Faiza Guene (Harcourt Paperback Original, $13, 179 pp)

Guene's spunky first novel is told in the voice of a flippant but ultimately confused adolescent who would remind me of Holden Caulfied except that she is a young Muslim girl. Doria, whose father has returned to Morocco because her mother can't bear him a son, was born in France, but she feels like an outsider, even in the Paradise projects that are anything but. With bravado, humor and a healthy dose of rage, she tries to navigate her way in a world filled with patronizing social workers, unfriendly neighbors and hard-working friends. Guene, the daughter of Algerian immigrants who grew up in a similar public housing project outside Paris, knows her characters and their dilemmas intimately. Writing this novel when she was only 19 (it was first published in France in 2004 to great acclaim), she offers us a glimpse into a world of poverty only a metro ride away from the fashionable boutiques and sidewalk cafes of Paris. And while the recent riots in the Parisian suburbs may make her optimism at book's end appear naive, it is comforting to know that not all second-generation Muslims believe that tomorrow holds no hope of change.

"My mom always dreamed France was like in those black-and-white films from the sixties. The ones where the handsome actor's always telling his woman so many pretty lies, a cigarette dangling from his lips. Back in Morocco, my mom and her cousin Bouchara found a way to pick up French channels with this antenna they rigged up from a stainless-steel couscous maker. So when she and my dad arrived in Livry-Gargan, just north of Paris, in February 1984, she thought they must have taken the wrong boat and ended up in the wrong country."

SALAAM, PARIS by Kavita Daswani (Plume, $14, 258 pp)

Kavita Daswani, a Bombay native who lives in Los Angeles, uses her background as a fashion correspondent well in this light confection of a novel that travels from a small town in India to Paris, New York and other hot spots.

Tanaya Shah is a sheltered young Muslim girl cursed with astonishing good looks who is betrothed to a friend of the family named Tariq. Tanaya persuades her old-fashioned Indian family to let her meet the man who lives in Paris before the marriage. Once she is in France, however, she realizes she doesn't want to return and eventually is lured into a modeling career that takes her to the top but cuts her off from all those she loves. It takes a rather clunky plot to arrive at the novel's happy ending, but the culture clashes ring true and the clothes are great.

"I took the Metro to Place de la Concorde and made my way into the Jardin des Tuileries ... I found a stone bench that was empty, set down my things, and took in the glorious morning. Joggers sprinted by, and mothers wheeled their babies in strollers. There was a clear crispness in the air, as if the world had overnight been cleansed of all its troubles ... Not a day passed when I didn't think of Nana and my mother or when I wouldn't yearn for a platter of bhel puri from a Mahim street vendor or hope to walk into a community gathering and hear the tinkling of glass bangles and the familiar rustle of silk saris ... But I was beginning to feel happy and at home."

Ghosts of Saint-Michel by Jake Lamar (St. Martin's Minotaur, $24.95, 261 pp)

A Bronx-born black American who has lived in Paris since 1993, Lamar chooses another kind of outsider for his tale set in Paris: Marva Dobbs, a black American who left her home in Bedford-Stuyvesant 39 years ago to seek her fortune in Paris. Married to a Breton, she has been running a successful soul food restaurant ever since.

Dobbs' bliss in the City of Lights is shattered when she has an affair with one of her cooks, a young Algerian named Hassan. Not her first marital infidelity (although it is the first time she's strayed since the birth of her daughter Naima, now 18), it's not the fling that turns her world upside down but Hassan's disappearance shortly after a bomb goes off at the headquarters of a United Nations agency in Paris, killing one bystander. Could her lover have been moonlighting as a terrorist?

If you can get past the fact that Lamar makes the French cops sound like they come from a bad Peter Sellers movie ("ze blast come at four in ze morning"), Ghosts of Saint-Michel is a meaty read. Taking place on the eve of 9/11, this thriller, the second Lamar has set in the bohemian Latin quarter, not only serves up action and intrigue but a fair amount of history as well. Did you know it was Richard Wright, the author of Native Son, who coined the term Black Power?

"L'HOMME DE LETTRES NOIR AMERICAIN RICHARD WRIGHT HABITA CET IMMEUBLE DE 1948 a 1959. So read the marble plaque beside the towering arched doorway of number 14 rue Monsieur-le-Prince in the Sixth Arrondissement. A crowd of about twenty African Americans had already gathered in front of the building and Naima easily slipped into the tourists' midst."

[Last modified July 7, 2006, 11:29:49]