Paris Vagabond by Jean-Paul Clébert

A much-needed new translation of one the great post-war French novels, even if it seems to contain little fiction. As one of the best books ever written about the French capital, Paris Vagabond takes its place alongside those other 20th century dreambooks – Le Paysan de Paris, Tropic of Cancer, Last Nights of Paris, Julian Green’s Paris, etc. – that make a world of that city, and one endlessly amenable to examination.

Clébert’s book is an assemblage of various notes made during and about his time on the streets of Paris – time spent not, he makes clear, as a mere flâneur, strolling full-bellied along the boulevards, but as a genuinely destitute vagabond living day to day in the city’s underbelly. They’re reports from a side of Paris that even then was ‘gradually disappearing, like a grease spot being vigorously rubbed out’ and which now is gone almost entirely. But the book’s documentary aspect (enhanced by the simple, clear-eyed photography of his friend Patrice Molinard, included in this edition), though valuable, is not the reason it will endure. What’s truly remarkable about Paris Vagabond is its proximity to life; its fidelity to and celebration of lived experience. Almost every one of its rolling, seemingly spontaneous, conversational paragraphs is filled with a kind of unfeigned awe at simply being alive, even when that life consists of hardship and brutality that most of us could barely imagine.