Paris feels uncharacteristically subdued these days. Even the demonstrations (Women’s Day, Palestine) are less raucous. Are we holding our collective breath in anticipation of the JO—Jours Olympiques? Going to be a long wait to exhale. Some predict chaotic crowds, while others argue that most Parisians will flee, leaving empty streets to the athletes and happy […]
July 14th. Bastille Day. Hallowed holiday in the Hexagon, celebrated with military marches and fly-overs, politicians’ cliché-crusted speeches—and fireworks! Millions of Frenchpersons lustily belting out the Marseillaise. A somewhat bizarre choice of national holiday, given that the glory that is la belle Patrie existed long before enraged crowds stormed the Bastille in 1789. Which was […]
Is any other major city as starkly, yet silently, divided as Paris? Not brawling London, not in-your-face New York. I recall also my teenage years in West Berlin before the Wall came down. There, on both sides, despite official enmity and opposing socio-economic scaffolding, intense curiosity reigned about how the ‘other half’ really lived. Letters […]
May 1st has forever been a big day in France. Long before the invention of trade unions (credited today to the USA by a Paris radio station!) and street demonstrations, it was a day of festivities and magic. Pots and bunches of lilies of the valley are sold on street corners now as centuries ago, […]
Any denizen of France will tell you: Certes, Athens, Florence and a few other cities had their moments, but Paris has reigned as the Western wellspring and magnet for arts and artists for centuries. The influence of French visual art, music and literature reaches beyond Euro-America into Asia and Africa, while drawing freely from those […]
ONE RIDER DOWN With at least one of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Trump, Putin, Orban, Erdogan, Modi et al.) knocked out of his saddle this morning, the world looks a little less damned. The Amazon can breathe! My intent yesterday was to ignore politics completely in this letter, but the defeat of Boss Bolsonaro […]
Not surprisingly with a political flavor. Dear readers in French, have you read Aneantir? Your thoughts? BOOK REVIEWS WORLD LITERATURE TODAY Michel Houellebecq, Political Animal? July 12, 2022 by Kai Maristed According to Christian Authier, himself a prizewinning novelist and recently the author of Houellebecq politique(Flammarion, 2022), Michel Houellebecq is “uncontestably the major [French] writer of […]
POINT de VUE: PARIS 
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