Paris to the Moon (2000)

I enjoyed these essays by a New Yorker living and bringing up a young son in Paris.Living in a foreign city allows more insight into the nature of the local culture than travel allows and Adam Gopnik is a thoughtful and insightful writer. ( )

Not so sold on this at the beginning, but really liked it by the end, especially the chapter/article on the World Cup. ( )

Articulate reflective compilation of articles written over five years from Pairs for the New Yorker Magazine. Gopnik brings an underlying warmth and affection for Parians, and adds a lovely self-awareness, whic allows him to discourse knowledgeably on the differences between life in New York and Paris. This was not a book to be gulped down in one sitting, but rather enjoyed as if each chapter (article) were a different course, or even meal. Enjoyed the discussion of couture fashion shows, soccer, a bureaucrat on trial for war crimes, and efforts to 'save' a favorite restaurant. 'The Rookie' was a personal favorite. ( )

There are travel memoirs that become classics. While they take place at a particular time, they either manage to grasp what is eternal about a place or they perfectly capture a lost version of the place they're writing about. Down and Out in Paris and London captures the eternal of being poor in a great place, I think, and A Moveable Feast is a snapshot of a great time that is gone and still mourned.

Adam Gopnik's account of a American family living in Paris for five years falls into a second category; a book that is a snapshot of a time and a place, but one that is rapidly fading and which will be forgotten in a few more years. It's a very specific memoir, full of a young father's infatuation with his son, and it's the story of a specific family (well-to-do New Yorkers writing for The New Yorker) in a specific place (Paris, circa 1995).

Which is not to say that this is not a highly readable book. It is. But I suspect that my enjoyment of it is based on the similarities of our experiences. I lived in Paris for a year and we started our family in a European country and watched our children being not altogether American. So much of what I liked about it were the parts where our experiences overlapped. Gopnik interviewed Bernard-Henri Levy; I had a crush on Levy when I lived in Paris (I was taken with the idea that a philosopher could be a sex-symbol). Gopnik's wife had their second child in Paris; I had my two children in Munich, and found Gopnik's experience to be similar to my own. My time in Paris occurred just a few years before Gopnik's, so that I recognized his version of Paris more readily than I do Paris of today.

There are pieces of this book that are very, very good. The chapter on the trial and surrounding media storm of a French public official charged with war crimes was excellent and a brief segment on the French interviewee's astonishment over being called by fact-checkers was funny and thought-provoking.

There is simply a lot of this book that is specific to Gopnik's own experiences and which doesn't expand to universality. His search for an American-style place to work out, for example, or the long story of his son's first crush at age five. And while the reader gets an painstaking account of the bedtime story Gopnik told his son, complete with his son's trenchant commentary, there is almost nothing about his wife or how the move affected their relationship.

I loved this book, but I think that I loved it because of the memories it brought back, more than for the writing itself. ( )

Always impressed by Adam Gopnik. My full review? here.Available at Teton County Library, call number 944.36 GOPNIK ( )