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100 Books, #26: Paris to the Moon
Jun. 22nd, 2013 12:12 pm“The food in those places wasn’t so much ‘rich’ as deep, dense. Each plat arrived looking mellow and varnished, like an old violin. Each mouthful registered like a fat organ chord in a tall church, hitting you hard and then echoing down the room.”
Adam Gopnik’s Paris to the Moon is a memoir and a travelogue, a mixture of two of my favorite genres; and it is one of the first books that I remember enjoying not only for its narrative pull or its quickly yet memorably sketched characters (although those are quite fine), but for the sheer lushness of the prose. Gopnik’s book, like the French food he describes, resounds like an organ chord.
It’s a hard book to quote. One can’t just pick out punchy one liners; many of the lines are lovely, but they draw their loveliness from the symphony of lines working together to build to something greater than themselves. It’s beautiful writing, but an old fashioned sort of beauty; I think often we don’t let our writing breathe that way anymore.
Of a taxidermist who bemoans the fact that they are no longer allowed to stuff big game animals, even if they die in zoos: “The government is worried, as governments will be, I suppose, that if fallen elephants are turned into merchandise, however lovely, then sooner or later elephants will not just be falling. Elephants will be nudged.”
Elephants will be nudged. The line is so striking to me: the juxtaposition of the enormous elephant and the miniscule force implied in nudged.
Or speaking of the Musee d’Orsay, where the grand, cold Academic paintings of the nineteenth century hang in the main hall, while the Impressionists are relegated to out-of-the-way rooms:
“It is a calculated, venom-filled insult on the part of French official culture against French civilization, revenge on the part of the academy and administration on everyone who escaped them. French official culture, having the upper hand, simply banishes French civilization to the garret, sends it to its room. What one feels, in that awful place, is violent indignation - and then an ever-increased sense of wonder that Manet and Degas and Monet, faced with the same stupidities of those same academic provocations in their own lifetimes, responded not with rage but with precision and grace and contemplative exactitude.”
Possibly Gopnik is the only person to ever accuse the Impressionists of precision. But it suits, in a way: they have precision of attitude, precision of mood. In any case, grace and contemplative exactitude (and, perhaps, a little rage) are the hallmarks of art; and Gopnik's book overflows with both.
Adam Gopnik’s Paris to the Moon is a memoir and a travelogue, a mixture of two of my favorite genres; and it is one of the first books that I remember enjoying not only for its narrative pull or its quickly yet memorably sketched characters (although those are quite fine), but for the sheer lushness of the prose. Gopnik’s book, like the French food he describes, resounds like an organ chord.
It’s a hard book to quote. One can’t just pick out punchy one liners; many of the lines are lovely, but they draw their loveliness from the symphony of lines working together to build to something greater than themselves. It’s beautiful writing, but an old fashioned sort of beauty; I think often we don’t let our writing breathe that way anymore.
Of a taxidermist who bemoans the fact that they are no longer allowed to stuff big game animals, even if they die in zoos: “The government is worried, as governments will be, I suppose, that if fallen elephants are turned into merchandise, however lovely, then sooner or later elephants will not just be falling. Elephants will be nudged.”
Elephants will be nudged. The line is so striking to me: the juxtaposition of the enormous elephant and the miniscule force implied in nudged.
Or speaking of the Musee d’Orsay, where the grand, cold Academic paintings of the nineteenth century hang in the main hall, while the Impressionists are relegated to out-of-the-way rooms:
“It is a calculated, venom-filled insult on the part of French official culture against French civilization, revenge on the part of the academy and administration on everyone who escaped them. French official culture, having the upper hand, simply banishes French civilization to the garret, sends it to its room. What one feels, in that awful place, is violent indignation - and then an ever-increased sense of wonder that Manet and Degas and Monet, faced with the same stupidities of those same academic provocations in their own lifetimes, responded not with rage but with precision and grace and contemplative exactitude.”
Possibly Gopnik is the only person to ever accuse the Impressionists of precision. But it suits, in a way: they have precision of attitude, precision of mood. In any case, grace and contemplative exactitude (and, perhaps, a little rage) are the hallmarks of art; and Gopnik's book overflows with both.
