Customer Reviews

A Corner in the Marais: Memoir of a Paris Neighborhood

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book reminded me of William Murray's City of Soul, about Rome. Karmel is obviously in love with his Paris and it is infectious.

The narrative about Karmel's first trip to Paris, then how he moved to Paris and bought an apartment in the Marais was intriguing, although his detours into the history of the neighborhood were less interesting. I found I wanted to know more about Karmel and his wife than about who had lived in his street two hundred years ago.

And the photographs! There are some marvelous black and white Atget photos in this book and although there really isn't much going on in them, these studies of shadow and light are worth the price of the book alone.

A Corner in the Marais is one of those books you don't need to read, but having read it, you feel better about life. It's a book to be treasured and passed along to family and friends. It traces the architectural and social history of one of Paris's most interesting neighborhoods. It reads like a novel because you also learn how the neighborhood touches the life of the author. In an over-commercialized world where evidence of a publisher's passion for quality is often absent, A Corner in the Marais stands for quality writing, quality layout, quality typography and quality paper and printing. A wonderful read.

I read this book on the train coming home from Paris and could picture the building, the neighborhood and really got a feeling for the area. I only wish the book had been longer and had delved into the author's personal life in Paris a bit more. Maybe in Volume Two, one can hope.

This is a relatively small and delightful book that offers a snapshot of life in Paris throughout history. The author purchased a small appartment in an old and relatively untouched partof Paris, and decided to research the history surroounding it. Thus he embarks on a bit of an adventure to find out about the previous owners and the building's usage, and in doing so gives the reader a (relatively brief) overview of the area.

It really is a charming view of Paris and the joys of living in a city that has seen so much history, from the earliest times when the area was outside the old walled city, up to the revolution, the Nazi occupation and the terrorism that blights the world today. The story is told in a charming and light hearted manner, and will appeal to those with a real interest in old Paris and all of its pleasures.

A small criticism - it could have been a bigger and more detailed book. Obviously a city such as Paris has a fabulous and fascinating history that the house observed in its quiet way from its unobtrusive corner. Perhaps there were no historical documents that tie it to these great events, but it was there nonetheless, and I feel that the book lacks a litle for these omissions.

Having said that, it is a charming book, and one which is well worth your time.

This is a great book to read while in Paris. With the book in hand, we easily found many points mentioned in it (and it answered some questions we had had while walking around the Marais on our own). It's very much a "labor of love" by someone who became intrigued by a small slice of history that, coincidentally, sheds some light on the broader picture over a long period. Anyone who enjoys history will envy the author's dig through old documents and records searching for even tangential mentions of his building, and the people associated with it. (Also recommended, for entirely other reasons: "Paris to the Moon," by Adam Gopnik.)

I loved this book, especially as I was staying a few doors down from his apartment in a hotel and it made my visit enhanced by his descriptions and thoughts.

If you have ever tried to research the history of your own home, you will be green with envy over the level of detail Karmel achieved not only about the structure but also about the neighborhood. Of course, Paris itself has a rich history that has been widely recorded. The author has very nicely dovetailed the history of Paris and its environs with the story of his pied-a-terre.

There are, I'm finding, an enormous number of books about Paris by Americans who live or have lived there, and they cover a great deal of literary, as well as geographic and chronological, ground. They range from the gushingly personal (Diane Johnson's Into a Paris Quartier) to the tightly focused (Paris Cafe: The Select Crowd by Noel Riley Fitch and illustrator Nick Tulka) to the intellectual (Edmund White's The Flaneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris) -- something for every taste. Because Alex Karmel's "A Corner in the Marais" has a little bit of all of this, it's clearly not to the taste of every reviewer. There is unquestionably a personal element to the story, the author's love for Paris, and for his particular corner of the Marais, being closely tied to his youth, the death of his mother, the memory of his first wife, and the fact that his second wife is herself Parisian. But there is another aspect of this book: it is a work of history. The author's researches into the history of the Marais, and the particular history of his particular building (told mostly through documentary evidence), seems to be what some reviewers found boring, but it fits in with the book's subtitle: this is, you could say, the neighborhood's memoir, not simply the author's. The balance felt about right to me.

The photography reprinted here is often evocative, and the period illustrations were sometimes helpful, sometimes not. The book suffers most notably from the lack of any maps of either the historic or the contemporary neighborhood, so I had to keep other references nearby to trace out the areas he was walking us through. I think "A Corner in the Marais" may work best as I am intending it -- as one tile in a literary mosaic, so to speak, of Americans in Paris. But it's a fine little book in its own right as well, and I think readers who appreciate its inherent balance will enjoy it as a quick and worthwhile read.

The author is not a very gripping writer of history, but when writing about his own experiences and his neighborhood in the present, he does a great job. It is a big task for someone who's not a professional historian to really work himself into different areas of European history, and Karmel is not equal to the task, falling back on numerous generalizations, particularly about the older periods he discusses. Read his description of the neighborhood in the modern period and skip the rest.

The author notes in the Foreword that "what has always interested me most in history is not the lives of great men or the analysis of the social, political, and economic forces that determined the great events, but rather the attempt to recreate a sense of what it was like to be an ordinary person living in a given era." Wow. A sentiment and a view of the past that is exactly after my own heart.

The author first saw Paris in the summer of 1949, as a Columbia undergraduate, and was immediately smitten. He felt he was "coming home" and for the next thirty-odd years he spent as much time there as possible. His second wife was Parisian herself and in the early 1980s, when they decided to relocate to France full-time, to a place in the country, they also decided to find a pied à terre in the city. What they came up with was a very small but recently renovated sixth-floor walk-up in a very old building in the quarter known as the Marais -- "the marsh" -- which was a run-down neighborhood at that time full of mostly-Jewish immigrants, but which had once been a middle-class district just inside the city wall (and which now has been rediscovered and includes some of the highest-priced residential property in Paris).

In Boston or Philadelphia, a home that dates from even 1700 is regarded with awe and is probably under the care of the local historical society. In most cases, it wouldn't even be a private residence any longer but would have been turned into a museum. Karmel's building, however, dates from at least the 1390s -- more than six centuries ago, during the Hundred Years War, and a century even before Columbus's first voyage. When he finally discovered just how old it was, he began researching the history of the building, the block it was located on, and the Marais generally, and he presents his findings here in a very readable and entirely fascinating way. Most of the building's history, of course, is anonymous, especially since most early records regarding fiefs and property rights were systematically destroyed during the Revolution -- but enough documents survived to cast light here and there. This is a especially true of what appears to be an auction of the property for debt in the mid-17th century, which was carefully stage-managed but those concerned in order to establish solid title to the property. He explains, too, the legal convolutions necessary in France at that time, and what sort of records were created as a result, all of which should be of considerable interest to anyone with an interest in European history of that period -- and his somewhat bemused attempts to untangle all the layers of familial relationships involved will interest genealogists. It isn't a big book, less than 150 pages, but it's easy to lose an afternoon in the story Karmel tells.