The Ruins of Paris

Translated by Mark Treharne From Belleville to Passy, from Montmartre to La-Butte-aux-Cailles, from Antony to Saint-Ouen - Jacques Reda is a traveller in his own city of Paris. In the tradition of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, he is a nervous, rather unleisurely flaneur, unsettling and subverting preconceived ideas about travel and home. The Ruins of Paris echoes with the footsteps and the words of a wanderer by turns gloomy, curious, troubled, elated, angry, tender and confused (and sometimes all these things at once). We are led through the arrondissements and suburbs of Paris and beyond in a journey that moves to the rhythm of walking, of trains, to the hopeful tempo of upbeat jazz. Reda the wanderer is forever on the move: he constantly sets off, stops, begins afresh, treasuring movement itself while journeying from place to place. Journeys that are at once exhilarating and familiar, journeys that mirror life itself and a world that ceaselessly rises anew from its own ruins. Jacques Reda's book is both a poetic meditation on Paris and a haunting companion to its views and moods.