Our Paris: Sketches from Memory | 
 enlarge | Authors: Edmund White, Hubert Sorin
Publisher: Ecco
Category: Book
List Price: $19.95
Buy New: $6.99
You Save: $12.96 (65%)
New (5) Used (13) Collectible (2) from $0.80
Rating:  5 reviews
Sales Rank: 445070
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 160
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5.4 x 0.7
ISBN: 0060085924
Dewey Decimal Number: 944.361
EAN: 9780060085926
ASIN: 0060085924
Publication Date: April 2002
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Near New,Last One,Non-Smoker-Returned,Display or Old Stock Item Nice Hardcover Book With a Dustcover,Some Shelfwear,Dings,Tight Binding,Crisp,Clean Bright Unmarked Text/Book-Priced to Sell-Lg3008
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Product Description
What happens when one of our most celebrated writers combines talents with a French artist and architect to capture life in their Parisian neighborhood? The result is a lighthearted, gently satiric portrait of the heart of Paris -- including the Marais, Les Halles, the two islands in the Seine, and the Châtelet -- and the people who call it home. It is an enchantingly varied world, populated not only by dazzling literati and ultrachic couturiers and art dealers but also by poetic shopkeepers, grandmotherly prostitutes, and, ever underfoot, an irrepressible basset hound named Fred. The foibles and eccentricities of these sometimes outrageous, always memorable individuals are brought to life with unfailing wit and affection.Below the surface of the sparkling humor in Our Paris, there is a tragic undercurrent. While Hubert Sorin was completing this work, he was nearing the end of his struggle with AIDS. The book is a tribute to the loving spirit with which the authors banished somberness and celebrated the pleasures of their life together.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Tender, fun, and touching September 19, 2007
Immensely readable, thoroughly enjoyable, and ultimately poignant. White puts it best in his bittersweet, fresh-wound of an afterword: "Despite the catty sound of this book, its name-dropping and archness, I hope at least a few readers will recognize that its subtext is love. Hubert loved me with unwavering devotion . . . I loved him, too, in my cold, stinting, confused way. I wanted to keep him alive as long as possible. This book gave us something to do while waiting for the end."
 If you can't go to Paris (or even if you can), read this book! July 13, 2005
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
A delightful book about White and Sorin's life in Paris, with an inevitable undercurrent of sadness, because Sorin is dying. Yet his inability to practice his work as an architect led him to develop the "unique, exuberant drawing style" that illustrates this book.
Here you will meet all sorts of interesting people. The concierge, Madame Denise, and the coiffeuse who tries out all the latest hairstyles on her. Father Pierre Riches, the "kind and elegant" Catholic priest whose hair had been stroked by Cavafy and whose photograph had been taken by Mapplethorpe. Billy Boy, the jewelry designer with 16,000 Barbies (who, tiring of them, invents a doll called Mdvany, a trendy Parisienne who "will not have unlined skirts like certain dolls we could name . . .". PIerre Guyotat, who wrote in a "strange subvocal language of his own devising, one that omitted vowels among other unnecessary luxuries."
And the places in Paris! How nice to live above a bookstore, especially one that revels in the splendidly punny name, Mona Lisait. To write at the Café Beaubourg, where the waiters will be equally attentive to you and your dog, and where the "tabletops were all painted by celebrated French artists but not signed lest they be stolen." To wander the Marais with its delicatessens and seventeenth-century townhouses, its "Kiki Boys" and dogwalkers.
If you have visited Paris, this book will bring back memories. If you haven't, you may find yourself calling a travel agent!
Parisian anecdotes told with American-style intimacy January 29, 2003
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
I picked up this little book for a return flight from Paris to LA. It looked like perfect plane reading -- short, gossipy, topical. And although it lived up to each of those expectations, the devastation implicit in the book (and explicit at the end) hit hard. The book is not easily forgettable -- and probably no less memorable for the passengers and crew of American Airlines flight 45 who watched me become a sniffling, tear-stained disaster. It's very intimate, shockingly un-French. White and Sorin invite you into their lives. You feel as if you're at a dinner party listening to them recount(even bicker a little about) their recent mundane adventures. But this intimacy also means that you feel very close to the heartbreaking loss that is the real subject of the book. It's a beautiful, touching book. The illustrations complement the text (or the text complements the illustrations) perfectly. But if you want to avoid the mess entirely, try The Flaneur.
Grand Deception May 9, 2000
15 out of 15 found this review helpful
I love deceptive books.Example: _Our Paris_, by Edmund White and Hubert Sorin, is ostensibly a series of short essays, written and illustrated in a fairly direct style, pertaining to life in the city. But in a stunning, disarming preface, White alerts us to the real subtext: his partner's slow death from AIDS. It's this subtext that transforms the book from a pleasant travelogue to a devastating account of loss. Lurking beneath the book's shimmering surfaces, and within its numerous lacunae, is the emotional life of a couple threatened by the fast-approaching specter of death. An attentive reading of White's text and Hubert Sorin's illustrations reveals the mauvaise foi, the daily negotiations, the implicit contract of domestic denial that enables an endangered couple to keep death at bay for just a little longer. _Our Paris_ looks slight, as if it were merely a pleasant evening's worth of travel anecdotes and gossip. But if you take yourself into this book's confidence, it will reveal unexpected secrets.
Paris, the French, love, and travel -- and eventual loss. January 19, 1998
9 out of 9 found this review helpful
This is a sweet collection of short pieces, quirky and personal, about a tiny Parisian neighborhood, Paris itself, the French, lots of friends, and a great dog named Fred. Most of all: about Edmund White and his lover Hubert Sorin. Economical yet enjoyably gossipy, kind-hearted, opinionated, informative. Achingly sad, though, because Hubert is dying of AIDS, and in fact does die at the book's end. Definitely worth reading -- especially for fans of Edmund White. Engagingly illustrated by Sorin, who was trained in architecture and took up drawing when he became ill.
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