About book Paris Noir: The Secret History Of A City (2007)
It's nice to have an opportunity to craft a review of a single text, instead of the unwieldy anthologies I'm usually reading.Here we have a remarkable book (note: despite the title, completely unrelated to the Akashic Press "City Noir" anthology series I'm reading concurrently). Originally published in France in 1954 under the titles PARIS SPELLBOUND and WITCHCRAFT STREET and available in an English translation thanks to Dedalus. This is a singular text - so odd, they had to settle on "Travel Writing" as the bookseller category, although that's no closer than any other possibility. I don't know enough literary history to say it's sui generis, but it is not the kind of thing you find very often.It is a text of parts, so that's probably the best way to examine it. On the one hand, it Yonnet's memoirs of his time in Occupied France working for the Resistance - you'd imagine that those experiences could fill an entire book themselves, but instead they merely serve as a backdrop, rearing forward only occasionally to intersect (sometimes unexpectedly) with other strands of the narrative. The book is also part geographical and cultural history, filling us in on pertinent details about events large and small in Parisian history. But pertinent to what? Well, that's another thread - as the book serves to document and record Yonnet's street-level experiences of the (mostly poor and/or criminal) people and places and scenes of Paris. And in doing this — spinning out anecdotes, urban legends, rumors, superstitions and folklore of the drunks, ne'er-do-wells, prostitutes, beggars and gangsters of the City of Lights — and relating it all to the geography and history of the place, while also emphasizing the ephemeral nature of landscape, how buildings come and go and streets are renamed, Yonnet almost seems to be performing some kind of occult record or evocation of the city, the time, and times gone past. In truth (and I'd be surprised if I was the first to say this), PARIS NOIR is a proto-text of the study of Psychogeography, less in its Situationist sense and more as it's practiced by Iain Sinclair and Alan Moore.How Yonnet achieves this is by using Nazi-Occupied Paris - a city under enormous stress, but in which life goes on "as usual" - as the skeleton on which he will hang dozens of tales, yarns, observations and character sketches he has collected over the years while moving among the poor peddlers and the demimonde. What's fascinating about this is that the moment in time is so rich with material - in present time, you have a secret battle going on to undermine an occupying force. Meanwhile, you have the average people living in those circumstances, unaware of it all. Then you have the stories of the older generations, catching the last surviving echoes of the fin-de-siècle and World War I. Then, the structures and spaces of the city itself, their placement and design, as concrete accretions of history, acting as psychopomps to guide thoughts underneath into the Deep History of the place, calling up the ghosts of buildings and streets long gone, and the spirits of events great and small. And through this an extremely powerful sense of *place* is evoked, not just *physical* and *temporal* place but psychic as well, a place comprised of lives and people and structures and actions and stories. The City as living organism! It's simply marvelous as both a record and something more, something larger, perhaps a desperate attempt to capture a transient snapshot during a moment in time when it was feasible that Paris as Yonnet knew it would cease to exist in a few years (no matter how hard he was working to defuse that possibility). And there is a lot of occult wisdom (the discussion of "The Temporal Void" and "arrested time" presages much Chaos Magick theory) secreted herein, as well, for those interested in such things (Actual WISDOM! How often can one say that about a book!)The community he captures is fractured and wounded, attempting to find equilibrium from old models, while existing in new, damaged forms (interesting how the Nazis, inadvertently, force solidarity among misfits). You will meet fags (in the most honest sense), whores (also in the most honest sense), junk dealers, and naive newcomers. Lesbian chanteuses, drunks and fallen priests. All the human flotsam and jetsam, all the vagrants, street crazies, beggars and con-men are noted and recorded. Criminals who seem to be characters out of some Gallic Brecht play, like the gangster Keep-On-Dancin', Dolly-The-Slow-Burner, Swindle-The-Hat, Redhead Dora. Smile at the Romany gentleman, unperturbed by Nazi interest in him, his courage and élan for life captured forever in text. Become charmed by the gangster who gives you a lesson in the occult mapping of the city, the magical properties of wood from shipwrecks, and then tells you the location of the secret, *true* center of Paris! Marvel at "The Sleeper", who heals people while he sleeps (and his eventual undoing). Puzzle over "The Old Man Who Appears After Midnight" (essentially, like a real-life, sardonic version of the old DC comic book character The Phantom Stranger) who always appears and disappears unexpectedly, after providing a word of advice...Real humans living real lives in real moments of time. And some of these transient underworld characters described (like the chanteuse Fréhel) have even been frozen in time by burgeoning technology (according to a footnote, Fréhel can be seen in Pépé Le Moko, a film from 1937).Through breezy snapshots, you will hear murmurings of:Fire-magic skills passed down through families in secret, but diminishing strength in the passing...A lesson in the obscure derivation of certain French words...The sealed, ancient cellars of mystery (on exploration divulging nothing, or possibly a terrible occult evil)...Horrific war stories...Tattoos (Satanic bat tattoos, tattooed penises) and their importance and the magical rituals used to empower them...Squalid death and the honor of drunks and bums....A certain avenue with many names but secretly known as Witchcraft Street....A femme fatale whose luck runs out...Gypsy magic, curses, secrets (the true meaning of the Christian cross and why Gypsies are not constrained by time or space) and cannibal rites to insure regal inheritance...Special watches that run backwards to keep the owner young or halt their aging...Random, coincidental and violent deaths...Obscure, tiny drinking establishments hidden in antique stores...Accidental hypnotic thralldom (and its terrible repercussions)...A history of "The Bohemians"...Cursed bridges...The "Temporal Void" and how to find it...A British war scientist who collects occult artifacts and investigates secret societies, connected to a network of exorcists and defrocked priests...A hotel room which (if occupied with the right woman) will force only the truth to be spoken...A group of storytellers who help undermine the Nazis by circulating specially tailored, subversive tall tales...Ritual sacrifice to restore the balance between "The Law" and "honest crooks"...A prototype of the Sweeney Todd legend...Shrimps fed on drowned suicides...The power of mummified ears...Revenge by puppet magic...There's a lurching, charmingly ramshackle quality to the writing (a book best read with a few under the belt, it should be noted), the imagery and dramatic absurdity, at times, seems informed by the Surrealists. Social conventions are noted and undermined with a deft observational stroke. Yonnet is a wonderfully inquisitive interlocutor with his subjects, teasing out details. Also, one almost gets a sense that this endless recording and categorizing of scattershot stories acts as a stress release for him from the pressures of Resistance espionage (at one point involving double agents and the need to quietly dismember a body). Would that one could retroactively re-weave reality so that every city, every locale, at every time period, had such a document created that preserved its secret history so, inscribed with such patience and insight!Honestly, one of the most enjoyable books I've ever read!
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