The Ruins of Paris
Jacques RedaFrom Belleville to Passy, from Montmartre to La-Butte-aux-Cailles, from Antony to Saint-Ouen, the author of this book is a traveller in his own city, Paris. The book is both a poetic meditation on Paris and a companion to its views and moods.
Translated by Mark Treharne
From Belleville to Passy, from Montmartre to La-Butte-aux-Cailles, from Antony to Saint-Ouen - Jacques Réda is a traveller in his own city of Paris. In the tradition of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, he is a nervous, rather unleisurely flâneur, 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.
Réda 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 Réda's book is both a poetic meditation on Paris and a haunting companion to its views and moods.
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In France, Jacques Rédas prose writings are passed back and forth between friends with the enthusiastic secret-sharing that one associates with fan clubs. Membership requirements include a taste for precise, tenderly ironic prose, polished to a delicacy of finish rarely attained by contemporary French writers.
'John Taylor, The Times Literary Supplement
Jacques Réda is the author of several collections of poetry including Récitatif (1970) and La Tourne (1975). Les Ruines de Paris was his first book of prose and is published here in English for the first time.