Paris Vagabond

(Paperback, Main)

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Paris Vagabond is an unclassifiable masterpiece, a book that purports to be a novel but, accompanied as it is by the photographs of Patrice Molinard, is as much a brilliant documentary as a work of the imagination. In rich prose, suffused with the language of the street, and brilliantly rendered in English by Donald Nicholson-Smith, Jean-Paul Clebert captures the essence of a long-gone Paris of the poor, the criminal, and the outcast: a society of outsiders beyond the social pale. Clebert's is a genuinely anarchist voice, a free spirit who was an intrepid explorer of a Paris that was in many places practically ruinous but where the poor were not yet completely marginalized. He was also a true writer's writer, hailed by his mentor and friend Blaise Cendrars and admired by Henry Miller, who said that reading Paris Vagabond "roiled my guts."

Reviews

A rollicking, poetically charged tale of privation and adventure, a first cousin of Kerouacs On the Road for all that it takes place within the confines of one city. Clbert finds all the hidden worldsthe shacks and Gypsy wagons on the periphery, the ostensibly vacant lots . . . the mushroom farms and serpentariums concealed inside apartments. . . .
Luc Sante

"A remarkably vivid, detailed book that seems to have been composed with no method, its narrative marked by a chaotic and cheerfully self-acknowledged spontaneity Clbert is a master of the long, cascading list-sentence, trippingly rendered into English by Donald Nicholson-Smith. His descriptions are mirrored by (not illustrated by) the bleak photographs of Patrice Molinard A connoisseur of chaos, Clbert is the poet of the lumpen-proletariat and of a forgotten city. Edmund White,The New York Times Book Review

"'This is not supposed to be a Baedeker or some tourist guide:' Clbert offers a hellish itinerary of the less fortunate quarters of Paris. First published in 1952, ClbertsParis insolitehas been classified as a novel, though it is as journalistic as George OrwellsDown and Out in Paris and London; if it has novelistic kinship, it might be to Jean GenetsThiefs Journal..The photographs, by Molinard, are in the stark documentary style of a Weegee or Robert Frank. Altogether, they add to the impression that this is less a novel than a book of reportage. But no matter how it's classified, it's a sobering, eyes-wide-open view of the Paris no guidebook would care to portray. Kirkus Reviews

Clberts vivid, incantatory descriptions of Pariss streets and back alleys, its abandoned attics and houses of ill-repute, its losers, liars, poor, criminals, and outcastsEnglish-language readers have had to wait until now to read Clberts magnificent ode to the underbelly of Paris, rendered beautifully from the French by translator Donald Nicholson-SmithClberts is a style of radical openness, and his sentences reproduce the possibilities of wandering, of getting lost. Hal Hlavinka, The Quarterly Conversation

Paris Vagabond is a pleasure to tag along with, from sentence to sentence, section to section, arrondissement to arrondissement. Its catalogs of wondersare as strange to my eyes as the catalogs of Herodotus or Italo Calvino...Paris Vagabond should be required reading for all Francophiles of the Eiffel Tower, Paris to the Moon variety...In brief, Nicholson-Smith has done a seamless job of reassembling Paris Insolite in English...Its hard to think of another book about Paris that is so entertaining, so brutal, or so genuine. Alex Andriesse, Reading in Translation

Poetry in the rough...Clberts acute insiders view of the erstwhile clandestine 'Zone' of Paris and other rundown quarters in 1944-1948, and the striking photographs by Patrice Molinard (1922-2002) that accompany the text, make an extraordinary book that should be in the hands of every lover of the French capital...a French classic long overdue in English, which has been given a vivid rendering by Donald Nicholson-Smith. John Taylor,The Arts Fuse

Readers who come to the printed page in search of lifeatrocious, beautiful, sordid, picturesque, funny and tragic life, of the warming sun and freezing rains, with behind it all a muscular and heartfelt sensualitythese readers will not be disappointed.
Henry Muller, Carrefour

The most startling, the most lively, the most Mysteries of Paris work to appear since the peregrinations of Grard de Nerval.Ren Fallet, Le Canard Enchan

Praise for The Blockhouse
Clberts prose...hits an unfailing stride in the febrile Poe-esque evocation of the horror climax...Clbert displays a very impressive and extremely painful talent for the inferno of [his characters] minds.Frederic Morton, The New York Times

Author Bio

Jean-Paul Clebert (1926-2011) joined the French Resistance in 1943 when he was sixteen. After the war, he traveled in Asia and worked as a house painter, cook, newspaper seller, farm worker, and cafe proprietor before returning to Paris and living as a vagrant for three or four years, an experience that influenced his 1952 work Unknown Paris. Clebert went on to write 32 books, including volumes on the history of southern France, where he moved in 1956. Donald Nicholson-Smith's translations of noir fiction include Manchette's Three to Kill; Thierry Jonquet's Mygale (a.k.a. Tarantula); and (with Alyson Waters) Yasmina Khadra's Cousin K. He has also translated works by Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Henri Lefebvre, Raoul Vaneigem, Antonin Artaud, Jean Laplanche, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Guy Debord. For NYRB Classics he has translated Manchette's Fatale and The Mad and the Bad, published in the US, and is presently working on Jean-Paul Clebert's Paris Insolite. Nicholson-Smith won the 28th Annual Translation Prize of the French-American Foundation and Florence Gould Foundation for fiction for his translation of Jean-Patrick Manchette's The Mad and the Bad. Born in Manchester, England, he is a longtime resident of New York City. Patrice Molinard (1922-2002) began his career taking stills for Georges Franju's legendary documentary on the Paris slaughterhouse at La Villette, Le Sang des Betes (1949). As a film director, he is best known for Fantasmagorie (1963), Orphee 70 (1968), and Bistrots de Paris (1977).