Customer Reviews

New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writings from the City

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Sometimes it takes someone from elsewhere to really appreciate a place. I have long been a fan of Andrei Codrescu's NPR commentaries and knew that he lived in New Orleans so when I saw this book I knew it would be good. It is. Codrescu, like so many of us who choose our new "hometown" loves everything about New Orleans and sees it with both loving and honest eyes. Like all great lovers he loves the flaws as much as he loves the beauties.

He writes about his years on carnival krews, about hours spent prowling the French Quarter, about Marie Laveau the legendary voodoo queen and other New Orleans characters, about food and the cemeteries where people meet as if they were parks. He writes about not being able to get out of his hammock --- all with wry humor, grace, and appreciation. And he writes with anger about Katrina and its aftermath.

I have only visited New Orleans but love it and was happy to be transported back there through the words of someone who notices everything and sees it honestly. I particularly appreciated some of his literary references. WARNING: this book can cause you to buy a lot more books. But, if you love New Orleans, you will treasure them, too.

I am a true fan of New Orleans. I read everything I can get my hands on about this city. Andrei Codrescu does an amazing job bringing you right back to this great city. You can almost smell the city as you read it. It is hard to put this book down. This is one of the best books I have ever read about New Orleans, My Love.

"New Orleans is Blache DuBois" the essayist tells us and in a few lines, he gives the evidence for something that we may have suspected. Here is a city that brags about its great literature and then begs you not to read it-or at least not take it seriously. Come buy our life, it says, just don't look at all the death.
And so, unlike many other love songs to particular places, Codrescu's is sad. Perhaps some other cities will evoke the same sense of folly and loss- Venice is a likely candidate-but you can't imagine a similar book about New York or Prague or even Rome.
This is a book of essays whose roots in radio are obvious. You can almost hear them spoken aloud. They are also remarkably personal-the author sees America as a displaced Rumanian-turned-American. The perspective is valuable and he doesn't deny the reader its benefits. Read him following the National Guard as it responds to a flood on the Mississippi near Hannibal, Mo. to be undeceived about us. Read his obit for Jim Monaghan, romantically crusty barkeeper to be gently hoodwinked again.
These are stories about a city, but more fundamentally stories about displacement and encountering one's second home town.
All in all, a great and provocative entertainment.

Lynn Hoffman, author ofbang BANG: A Novel which is set in the author's second home town.

I've been a fan of Codrescu for years through his spoken word bits he's done on National Public Radio (NPR). This is a collection of essays that he's written over a twenty year period about his adopted city of New Orleans, and it is a marvelous read. Codrescu's humor and insight are always sharp, and ordering this collection in this way allows the reader to follow his love affair with the city as it evolves from an initial infatuation to a deep and abiding love (the good and the bad), with the dark, unhappy moments that come with the package. Knowing about hurricane Katrina and post-Katrina New Orleans only serves to make many of his early observations even more relevant and powerful. Codrescu's essays reveal an ever-present awareness, likely shared by his neighbors, that the City was living on the edge of disaster.

I normally recommend reading collections like this in bits and pieces, and, certainly, one could do that, but the coherency of this anthology is so striking that I'd suggest taking it all in as you would a memoir or biography - a memoir is what this anthology turns out to be.

I recommend purchasing this book if you plan to, or have been to New Orleans. I have to say it was a great complement to my trip and is still a good read if you're just looking to sit back and have a good read.

Reading this book makes me ache to go back to the only place i've ever felt at home. He gets it. It's not sugar coated or sensationalized. He talks about the good the bad and the beautiful weirdness that is New Orleans. The stories are interesting and well told. I laighed and cried reading this book and I really wanted to be part of this man's cirle of friends. Very good read. Especially if you are already interested in NOLA or if you have some sort of connection to the place.

I picked this book up for a research project but it turned into a wonderment! I've fallen in love with the city, in that exciting kind of romance of meeting an exciting stranger, and all the while knowing that our relationship can't end well.
When driving across town, I had my wife read it to me. It's flash article format makes it great for lots of quick reads. My wife enjoyed reading it too.

Nice job Andrei!

A wonderful collection of essays about New Orleans spanning 2 decades from the mid-80s up to post-Katrina today where "the American dream came unmoored..."

Codrescu is one of my favorite poets and essayists he doesn't fail to deliver here. I'm quite partial to Codrescu's use of language..."I like people who stumble through language without any idea of what they might run into. It's what I do. I like myself. Sometimes."

As a gifted poet, Codrescu writes with precision, employing an exceptional economy of words and more importantly, always choosing the correct word. (As a result of reading this during the Great Northeastern Spring Floods of 2010, the word "bumbershoot" has returned to my own lexicon!).

Codrescu continually employs apt and often humorous metaphors in his writing - there is no short supply of these here..."New Orleans cemeteries look like vast bakeries quietly holding the ancestral loaves. This is no idle metaphor in a city that loves its dead as much as its food. The sense that life and death are locked in amorous gourmandise is everywhere."

I have only been to N.O. once, and as much as I loved my time there and long to return, Codrescu has taken me there and has made his city so much more real for me. He makes me wonderfully aware of the difference of seeing the city as a tourist and as a Bohemian New Orleansian. That's not to say he doesn't appreciate and accept us tacky tourists for our ever-present and essential role in his city..."If you don't like visitors, you shouldn't live in New Orleans. ... You don't have to be a whore if you live in a whorehouse, but it helps. Everybody who lives here works for the house, like it or not."

I highly recomend this book for those interested in a fine collection of short essays with a one-of-a-kind take on perhaps the most unique of all American cities. I read this on my Kindle and will return to these selections again and again - hopefully in preparation for a return trip before too long.

Somehow I had never heard of Andrei Codrescu. Once I did, I discovered that he is nigh ubiquitous, both as a commentator on NPR's "All Things Considered" (which I rarely listen to) and as a prolific author. Since, like many others, I have a very fond spot in my heart for New Orleans, I decided to sample Codrescu via his book NEW ORLEANS, MON AMOUR.

Sometime in the mid-80's, infatuated with New Orleans, Codrescu moved to the city. NEW ORLEANS, MON AMOUR is a collection of the various Codrescu pieces over the years (between 1985 and 2006) that feature, directly or indirectly, New Orleans. Many are brief, a little over one page; the longest is 40 pages. The pieces are arranged in chronological order. Despite the common theme, the book is very much a hodgepodge. I found the pieces rather uneven in quality and effect; in general, they improve as one gets deeper into the book, as, I guess, Codrescu matures and improves as a writer. Even so, the writing only occasionally is top-rate.

Still, scattered throughout the book are passages that capture, almost perfectly, some of the distinctive aspects of New Orleans. For example:

"When writers come here they walk about smelling everything because New Orleans is, above all, a town where the heady scent of jasmine or sweet olive mingles with the cloying stink of sugar refineries and the musky mud smell of the Mississippi. It's an intoxicating brew of rotting and generating, a feeling of death and life simultaneously occurring and inextricably linked. It's a feeling only the rich music seeping all night out of the cracks of homes and rickety clubs can give you, a feeling that the mysteries of night could go on forever, and that there is little difference between life and death except for poetry and song."

The last four entries in the book were written after Hurricane Katrina. Codrescu sees them as "eulogies * * * for something that was and will never be again." I think I will heed Codrescu on this matter and never again return to New Orleans, where over the years I had spent a dozen or so magical and surreal weeks and weekends. But I also think I will have to find some other book to be my touchstone for my personal "Mon Amour, New Orleans".

3-1/2 stars.

Fantastic - evocative, inspiring and engaging. Great writing about a fantastic city - it puts me in mind of that great NOLA title by Richard Katrovas - Mystic Pig. Definitely get it - you won't regret it.