Paris and Elsewhere (New York Review Books Classics)

Apparently, Paris was perfect when the author was young (in the 1930s to 50s), but has steadily gone downhill ever since. Admittedly, book was written at a Paris low point, at least architecturally, the 1960s, but it is VERY curmudgeonly, if still making a point about the ravages of gentrification. But this business of the picturesqueness of the old Paris types--he never asks how these people really lived, and in many cases, I'm sure it was a very hard life, if nice for author to experience from his point of view.

Excellently written, in fact some of the episodes are exquisitely funny, like the description of the Marxist couple who cling to their foolish ideology long after everyone else has given it up. The husband is an eminence grise while the wife is an aging flamboyard, who can't sit still even at the dinner table--meanwhile their children, who range from the disinterested to the unintelligently morose, snort, smirk and ignore them.

This collection of Cobb's essays is another book in the NYRB series which I did not want to finish reading. These essays are about more than Paris or Normandy or even Europe; here is a record left by an Englishman who passionately loved a place, a bi-cultural historian and writer who grew his soul between the rare archived records of France and the living streets he loved.Richard Cobb has shown me that writing a memoir of place is a sensory experience. His essays are so rich in textured intimacy that I feel "le Cobb" is living still. One can find him strolling down an avenue observing every alteration of the weather, every change in the pavement, in the passersby, their clothing and language. I imagine Cobb still sitting in his favorite haunt, the late night and early morning caf?, sipping the 4:00 a.m. calvados, or apple brandy, as he watches the barges come up the river. From his youth, to his late travels, Cobb had found that one cannot write history without knowing the living. Le Cobb called himself a "prisoner of habit" (301), and this, I believe, is the key to the depth of detail in his writing. He frequented the same places, the same towns, kept in touch with the same French and Belgian friends. But there is also something exquisitely lonely about Cobb, the solitary observer, that appeals to the wounded romantic in every traveler.I'm concerned that the general reader will not pick up this book; the density of language in Paris and Elsewhere appears to be for the intimate specialist only. But the essays are about desire for a place, about human interaction in that space, how people create each other's lives, and the anger and grief one feels when a beloved city or village is altered forever--phenomena and feelings which anyone can apply to anyplace in the world. I highly recommend this book for people involved in city planning, the New Urbanists, any reader wondering why the French no longer wear berets, or any reader looking for a context or background as to how or why the recent riots and rebellions occurred across France in the past year.Cobb loved France enough to criticize the French particularly in the decades from the Baron Haussman in the mid 19th-century to Georges Pompidou in the 1970s when so much destruction was visited upon Paris in the name of `architecture.' Cobb shows that Brussels and Paris sustained more damage after World War II than before: "The damage which has been inflicted on these two cities is not, then, the result of enemy--or Allied--action" (200). In Paris distinctive neighborhoods were destroyed by the French themselves with no concern for how people's lives were being altered or the monoculture being created. Well, Monsieur Cobb, this vandalism to intimate dwellings, social settings, tiny restaurants, private gardens, the homes and boulevards of experience, is now a global condition. Thank you so much, Professor Cobb, for such beautiful writing on such a bittersweet topic.

Professor Cobb was best known as a leading historian of the French evolution, but he was a true Francophile, who loved the Paris he remembered from the 1930s. His book, The Streets of Paris, with text by Cobb & photos from Nicholas Breach taken in the 1970s (or possibly late 1960s) is another classic, well worth seeking out. This is the Paris of the classic b&w French film noir, destroyed in the name of 'progress' by Pompidou et al. Don't get me wrong, a lot of these buildings were in dreadful condition, but what replaced them is generally awful. Paris and Elsewhere gives an insight into a Paris that may not exist anymore, and conveys a powerful impression of what the non-tourist parts of the city were like to live in. Cobb, even by Oxford University standards, was an excentric par excellance, but he was a very fine writer indeed.