Customer Reviews

Haussmann, or the Distinction: A Novel

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Framed as a 1920s novel by an obscure French poet, based on the life of Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann, the ambitious mid-19th century Prefect of Paris, LaFarge's ("The Artist of the Missing") second book transports the reader to a cramped, unsanitary, venerable Paris in the midst of its transformation to a modern airy city of wide boulevards and functional sewers - as envisioned by Haussmann.

The narrative opens by questioning the story that on his deathbed Haussmann regretted his modernizing zeal. "Regret is a backward-turning emotion, and the Baron was famous for straightforwardness; he made the boulevards and razed the crooked lanes where tanners' sheds fronted cracked courtyards and sewer ditches spilled over into the bins of wire and paper petals of the artificial-flower makers for which the city, before his arrival on the scene, was famous."

This regret is the thread the all-but-omniscient narrator follows from the old Paris that spawned a great, clandestine love, to the ambition and modern rigidity that crushed it, leaving a bitter thirst for revenge in the ruins.

Haussmann's lover, Madeleine, was born in 1840 in the tumult and squalor of old Paris. "Born to a tanner's dying wife, she was dropped in the Bievre. There she was saved by pollution, for the river was already so laden with debris that nothing more could sink into it." Fished out by a lamplighter who encourages her to regard the mystery of her birth as a special emancipation, and later raised in a convent where the nuns suspect a noble lineage, Madeleine's discovery of her actual parentage drives her to flee into "the cool, criminal indifference of the street."

When she surfaces again, she has found refuge in the home (and arms) of M. de Fonce, the "demolition man" who has grown rich on the clean sweep of Haussmann's modernizing broom. De Fonce has schooled himself in the value and appreciation of "the overlooked" and rich Parisians flock to his door for souvenirs of Paris' vanished buildings. And there, Haussmann meets Madeleine.

LaFarge's style is exuberantly Dickensian - full of painterly detail and droll quirks. The rounds of the lamplighter in old Paris are as vivid as the well-organized domicile of the Prefect or the subterranean warrens of the Paris library. Good natured ridicule is heaped equally high on the "celebrated decorum" of the court of the nervous Emperor Louis Napoleon and the flamboyantly artificial balls of the demi-monde. Much is made of hypocrisy, venality, greed and ambition. The serpentine plot winds through political and amorous intrigue, building to a frenzied crisis over Haussmann's grand plan to move the Paris cemeteries outside of the city and build a Railroad of the Dead.

His characters are richly and lovingly imagined, their foibles and fancies turned out with affectionate humor. Madeleine as a young convent girl fond of cats: "And Madeleine loved most of all that which was catlike in herself, in other words, that which achieved freedom without struggle and independence without loneliness, and for all that never had to go long without food."

And De Fonce's approach to people: "Just as a building becomes rich in artifacts right before it is demolished, so de Fonce found that he was best able to exploit his connoisseurship of human character by imagining those he met as near their ends. The demolition man addressed himself to a banker as he would to a dying patriarch, and to a civil servant as to a soldier polishing his boots the night before a battle with the Turk...."

And Haussmann, so much the visionary civil servant, hastening to consult de Fonce on the question of multiple personalities upon reading of an ordinary shepherd who committed a grisly murder, then had no recollection of it: "The question, yes, of what Sorgel was, really? A shepherd? Or a foot chopper? Which is the main current and which the tributary? ...What would de Fonce think? Would the next century bring a science that could answer such questions, a sort of hydraulics of the mind?"

Impressively researched, beautifully written, humorous and wise, LaFarge's novel captivates the reader with love and loss and lingers over the mixed virtues of prudence, impulse, heritage and progress.

Having recently returned from a visit in Paris and being familiar with the city's history, it was exciting to read this historical fiction concerning Haussmann. The book flows beautifully and I found it hard to put down. The author has an enjoyable way with words and you'll find yourself quickly caught up in this triangle. (I admit to having been fooled that this was supposedly a translation of a French book written in 1922. Until I read the Amazon review, I was admiring this "older" style of writing and wishing more people wrote like this today. I'm sure the author would get a grin out of that!)

This book is as wonderful to listen to as to read, it seems, for that is how I experienced it. I, too, was taken in by the pretense and only realized that it is, in fact, a modern book when i read the reviews here. It is seldom, these days, that I read a book that is so beautifully written, by an author with such a love and command of language, as well as a real talent for recreating a world and its occupants. I fell in love with little Madeleine and her first love in the convent.

I know I will be looking for more books by the same hand, because this novel pulled me into its world, so that it even made its way into my dreams. What more could I ask for in a book?!

I highly recommend it!

I read this for a book club and was not disappointed, but I don't think I'll read it again. This fictional look at Paris and its Prefect is well written.

If you like writers in love with the sound of their own writing, this is for you. Any sense of story is bogged down with affectation and self indulgence. Boring.