Available in English for the first time, Paris Vagabond comes from the notes Jean-Paul Clebert took during his down-and-out years traversing the underbelly of Paris, all the while rubbing shoulders with Paris's post-war literary and artistic elite. Accompanied by 115 black and white photos by Patrice Molinard, Paris Vagabond is part imagined novel and part document of 1950s Paris, brought to life by the free-spirited writing of Clebert, who captured a long-gone era when Paris was a place for outcasts and those living on the fringe.
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).
“A rollicking, poetically charged tale of privation and adventure,
a first cousin of Kerouac’s On the Road for all that it takes place
within the confines of one city. Clébert finds all the hidden
worlds—the 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… Clébert 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, Clébert 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:'
Clébert offers a hellish itinerary of the less fortunate quarters
of Paris. First published in 1952, Clébert’s Paris
insolite has been classified as a novel, though it is as
journalistic as George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and
London; if it has novelistic kinship, it might be to Jean
Genet’s Thief’s 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
“Clébert’s vivid, incantatory descriptions of Paris’s streets and
back alleys, its abandoned attics and houses of ill-repute, its
losers, liars, poor, criminals, and outcasts…English-language
readers have had to wait until now to read Clébert’s magnificent
ode to the underbelly of Paris, rendered beautifully from the
French by translator Donald Nicholson-Smith…Clébert’s 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 wonders…are 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...It’s 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...Clébert’s acute insider’s 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 life—atrocious,
beautiful, sordid, picturesque, funny and tragic life, of the
warming sun and freezing rains, with behind it all a muscular and
heartfelt sensuality—these 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 Gérard de Nerval.”—René
Fallet, Le Canard Enchaîné
Praise for The Blockhouse
“Clébert’s prose...hits an unfailing stride in the febrile
Poe-esque evocation of the horror climax...Clébert displays a very
impressive and extremely painful talent for the inferno of [his
characters’] minds.”—Frederic Morton, The New York Times
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