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jennifer's reviews
173 reviews
Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London by Lauren Elkin
3.0
Well-written and researched and, yet, for a book that hit every target market button in me (peripatetic, literature-loving, inveterate walker woman), I wanted to enjoy this read more than I did. I think perhaps it suffered by comparison to Jessa Crispin's excellent The Dead Ladies Project, which I read earlier this year. The books have a lot in common: women wandering around Europe (Elkin also spends time in New York and Tokyo) writing about artists who intrigue them interspersed with memoir. They even cover some of the same ground, namely London and Paris and Jean Rhys, albeit with very different takes. Elkin's chapter on the writer Martha Gellhorn also reminded me of Crispin's on Rebecca West. In short, Flâneuse became for me the square girl's version of Dead Ladies, which I write with the authority of being a square girl myself.
Part of what I mean by "square" has not just to do with what Elkin discloses about herself but that she is an academic, and the writing feels academic in parts. Flâneuse closes with 25 pages of a Bibliography and Notes, testament to what went into the book and the kind of detail you can expect. There are indeed gems in here, but I sometimes felt I had to wade through a lot to find them.
Part of what I mean by "square" has not just to do with what Elkin discloses about herself but that she is an academic, and the writing feels academic in parts. Flâneuse closes with 25 pages of a Bibliography and Notes, testament to what went into the book and the kind of detail you can expect. There are indeed gems in here, but I sometimes felt I had to wade through a lot to find them.
The Odd Woman and the City by Vivian Gornick
4.0
An engaging memoir about Gornick's abiding love for New York City, walking, literature, and a cherished friendship. Her observation of this relationship, and perhaps any intimate relationship, is keen:
"My friendship with Leonard began with me invoking the laws of love: the ones that involve expectancy. "We are one," I decided shortly after we met. "You are me, I am you, it is our obligation to save each other." It took years for me to realize this sentiment was off the mark. What we are, in fact, is a pair of solitary travelers slogging through the country of our lives, meeting up from time to time at the outer limit to give each other border reports."
The book itself is a sort of border report, gratefully received by this reader.
"My friendship with Leonard began with me invoking the laws of love: the ones that involve expectancy. "We are one," I decided shortly after we met. "You are me, I am you, it is our obligation to save each other." It took years for me to realize this sentiment was off the mark. What we are, in fact, is a pair of solitary travelers slogging through the country of our lives, meeting up from time to time at the outer limit to give each other border reports."
The book itself is a sort of border report, gratefully received by this reader.