“So many books about Paris are concerned with the rich, matronly capital city, but this one, originally published in French in 1952, is about the postwar Paris of the poor and their not always successful efforts to eat, drink and stay warm. It’s a picture of a bohemian Paris that has now all but disappeared, though I say ‘bohemian’ advisedly since Jean-Paul Clébert (who was born in 1926 and died in 2011) had a horror of the picturesque. A middle-class boy, Clébert ran away from a Jesuit boarding school at 17 and joined the French Resistance. After World War II, he decided to live rough, scribbling notes about the things he observed and stuffing them away for safekeeping. Then one day he sat down to write. This method produced a remarkably vivid, detailed book that seems to have been composed with no method, its narrative marked by a chaotic and cheerfully self-acknowledged spontaneity. ..."
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