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Paris Trance: A Romance [Paperback]

Geoff Dyer
2.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)


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Book Description

May 15, 2000
Luke moves to Paris and, with his new love and the other expatriate couple from whom they become inseparable, wanders the Eleventh Arrondissement where clubs, cafés, banter, and ecstasy now occupy Gertrude Stein's city "which is not real but is really there."

In Paris Trance, Geoff Dyer fixes a dream of happiness--and its aftermath--with photographic precision. Boldly erotic and hauntingly elegiac, comic and romantic, this brilliant reconception of the classic expatriate novels of the Lost Generation confirms Dyer as one of our most original and talented writers.


Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Recipe for a millennial novel about twentysomethings living abroad: Take two couples and combine with equal parts desperation and languid slacking. Gently blend with just a pinch of romance. Actually, on second thought, just dump a whole lot of sex into the pot and bring to a boil. Sprinkle with lengthy discussions about the merits of particular movies, directors, etc. Finally, just add drugs. Ready to serve!

Geoff Dyer's Paris Trance is full of these ingredients. Luke and Alex are Englishmen living in Paris, spending their days packing books in a warehouse and spending their free time playing football and quoting sections of dialogue from Blade Runner. Soon they hook up with their respective mates--Luke with Nicole, Alex with Sahra--and proceed to party heavily.

What distinguishes this novel from its hip brethren is its ability to evoke a sense of coziness with these expatriates, to the point where their idle chitchat seems utterly familiar, if benign. Here's some of the loopy, go-nowhere dialogue with which Dyer fills their mouths:

"I can't imagine not being with him, either," said Nicole. "But I can imagine him not being with me--but I can't imagine him being with anyone else. Whereas although I can't imagine me not being with him, I can imagine me being with someone else. Does that make sense? I'm not sure I followed it myself."
Neither are we. But that's beside the point. Paris Trance succeeds and fails on its own set of criteria--how to capture a moment in time and preserve a feeling within it. In this case the feeling is a dreamy, warm one. --Ryan Boudinot --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

"Whatever makes events into a story is almost entirely missing from what follows," claims the narrator of this alluring pseudo-memoir of a blissful interlude lost and remembered. Fashionable fin-de-si?cle lack of faith in the cohesion of experience or the ability of language to contain it detracts nothing from the lyrical intelligence of Dyer's (Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence) wittily British "story" of two men playing expat in ParisAone of whom, Alex, is the unstated narrator, though he refers to himself in the third person. The story is this: 27-year-old Luke Barnes has left England for Paris in order to write a novel, but life overtakes his plans. He finds a friend in Alex, who shares his fascination with filmAa medium with the capacity, like music, to repeat itself endlessly. Luke meets and falls in love with Nicole, a beautiful Yugoslavian finishing her studies in Paris; Alex's partner is Sahra, an interpreter also new to the city. The two couples spend their time in search of the ultimate experience, the eternal "now." They vacation together, experiment with sex and drugs and go to dance clubs where the trance-like music prescribes "no distance or direction." Inevitably, ecstasy loses its edge, and as if compelled to enact the ending of one of his beloved films, Luke moves away. When Alex encounters him years later, Luke has embraced a lonely anonymity. The book ends not with this hopeless finality, though, but with the description of a rapturous, timeless afternoon by the sea enjoyed by the four lovers in their heyday. Thus, by writing the novel that Luke should have written, Alex succeeds, to an extent, in conquering time, in giving himself "the chance to rearrange, alter, change; to make things end differently." Hypnotic and evocative, this complicated novel is a superb re-creation of an idyllic time, the dreamy druggy Eden of golden youth. (May) in criticism.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

  • Paperback: 272 pages
  • Publisher: North Point Press; First Edition edition (May 15, 2000)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0865476004
  • ISBN-13: 978-0865476004
  • Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
  • Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,616,384 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Geoff Dyer is the author of four novels and six other nonfiction books, including But Beautiful, which was awarded the Somerset Maugham Prize, and Out of Sheer Rage, which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. The winner of a Lannan Literary Award, the International Centre of Photography's 2006 Infinity Award for writing on photography, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters' E. M. Forster Award, Dyer is a regular contributor to many publications in the US and UK. He lives in London. For more information visit Geoff Dyer's official website: www.geoffdyer.com

Customer Reviews

Why does the reader not care about any of the characters in the least? "r999"  |  5 reviewers made a similar statement
Ultimately, I felt like Dyer was trying to live vicariously through his characters. Nandy  |  2 reviewers made a similar statement
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars A Smashing Surprise December 18, 2000
Format:Paperback
I read this book not expecting much. It seemed to be an example of someone trying to recreate the books of the lost generation in post-modern dress. I thought it would fail to be something new. I was astounded at how wrong I was. This book has some major faults but they are sandwhiched between large segments of the novel that are amazingly brilliant. This is, perhaps, the best look at the feelings of early love Ive ever read. The book is a deep look at beauty and happiness, asnd the degree to which moments of happiness survive the passage of time. Dyer brilliantly uses a second person narrator who admitedly tells the reader mental thoughts of the characters that he could not know. He has decided that since the main character will not tell his story, he must do it for him and he must fill in the holes. He does so in brilliant fashion. He captures what it is like to be twentysomething and in love, he captures what it is like to be in love in Paris, and he manages to capture the spirit of lawrence, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Dos Passos WITHOUT it feeling like a retelling of modernism. The book is definitively post-modern both in style and message, but still manages to update the tropes founded by The Sun Also Rises. A must read for any fan of post-modernism OR the lost generation. Dyer may well be Britain's most promising young writer. This is a life-affirming novel.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars A BLEAK RATHER INCOHERENT TALE July 5, 2004
Format:Paperback
Just as a drunk's jokes fall flat before those who are sober, so drug induced experiences are surreal to those whose awareness has not been chemically altered. Such is often the case in Paris Trance, the seventh novel by English author/journalist Geoff Dyer. One wishes to empathize with the characters, but finds it difficult to relate.

This puzzling rather incohesive tale of misspent youth set in the City of Light covers several years in the lives of four twenty-something expatriates who trade arch remarks, go to many movies (Cassavetes films being a special favorite), are often strung out on Ecstasy, and have non-stop sex.

Luke arrives in Paris from England with the announced intention of writing a book, but he never sets pen to paper. He is lonely, yet neglects to learn French, and wanders aimlessly until he finds work at the Garnier Warehouse overseen by Lazare, who seeks contentment in "whipping himself into a froth of anger and irritation."

It is at the warehouse that Luke meets Alex, a fellow Britisher and film buff with whom he becomes fast friends as "there was an immediate ease and sympathy between them."

"They flourished in each other's company, their intimacy increased as they met more people. Things Alex said in groups were always addressed implicitly to Luke; other people were used as a way of reflecting back something Luke intended primarily for Alex."

Shortly thereafter Luke meets and becomes involved with Nicole, a Belgrade, who came to Paris on a scholarship and now works as a translator. Alex partners with Sahra, an interpreter from Libya. The foursome become inseparable, sharing meals, holidays, and dancing the nights away with drug fueled energy.

In a year or so the two couples go their separate ways - Sahra and Alex stop taking E and "Saying no to E - or anything else for that matter - was like saying no to Luke,"
whose "happiness had begun to have a desperate edge to it."

As abruptly as he had arrived on the scene Luke leaves Paris. He goes first to America, later Mexico, then finally returns to London.

Some eight years later when Alex is in London for a relative's funeral, he again finds Luke. He is living in a dismal flat where, as Alex writes, "As soon as I stepped inside I could feel the loneliness, could smell the life he led..."

Mr. Dyer is a capable, gifted writer. He has a keen ear and exhibits a deft knack for innovative, colorful phrasing. Nonetheless, with Paris Trance he has painted a bleak landscape littered with wasted lives.

- Gail Cooke

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Paris Trance is both a novel and an elegy about romance, destiny, intimacy, and the rise and fall of an intense, short-lived friendship between two couples living an expatriate existence in 1990's Paris. The main character, Luke Barnes, arrives in Paris animated by a half-formed desire to write a novel, or perhaps make a film and live in a world of possibilities where one can move towards the center of one's own life; rapture, intimacy, consuming and discarding each moment. Luke forms a strong, brotherly bond with Alex, another Brit expat for whom Luke becomes one part of a vicariously lived whole. The two men hook up with girlfriends, and far too much time is spent on the humdrum details of each relationship/romance, which seems to slow the novel down considerably. But this problem is more than made up for by the strong focus on the bonds of friendship and intimacy between the two couples, deepend by the shared experience of tripping on ecstasy while being blasted by loud, house music until six o'clock in the morning; "They were still full of chemically engendered expectation but that anticipation was gradually coming to refer to the past, to something that had already taken place. They were wide wake, distracted, glowing." But Luke's quest to reach the peak of happiness, to "move to the center of one's own life" is seen by Sahra, Alex' girlfriend and Luke's friend, as a destructive flaw; "He doesn't really have emotions. Just appetites. At the moment he's as happy as a sandboy because there's so much still to gobble down. But what's he going to be like when he's tried it all ? " The emotional void/greed of Luke is further explored by his desire to hang on to, for a moment longer, a "tantalizing echo" of an experience lived just seconds ago; "And at that moment you glimpse the Eternal Recurrence as a potential fact, as a mechanism, rather than a metaphor. That is the solution contained in the riddle of deja vu. All memories are premonitions, all premonitions are memories". The novel also explores what one might call an expat view of existentialism, of seeing one's destiny not from the perspective of the positive will to achieve, but from that of failing so absolutely that one embraces it as one's true self, true destiny, the triumph of negative possibilities; "By letting things occur as they did he believed he was penetrating more deeply into himself, getting closer to the core. "All of the things he associated with happiness came to be lodged absolutely in his past. "his falling short was a kind of triumph; he was being faithful to some part of himself, to his destiny". One can't help but be reminded of the main character in Albert Camus' The Stranger, and of the "Black winds" of one's negative destiny. Luke never writes his novel, never makes his film, breaks up with Nicole, a woman he loves deeply, and separates himself from everything that makes him happy in an effort to confront his true self, his blighted destiny; "there are all sorts of propensities in people-but there are other kinds of negative potential: the potential for wasting the talents we are given, for blighting our prospects of happiness". Geoff Dyer is as close as Gen-X will get to reading their own version of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Paris Trance is an excellent, if extreme, example. This novel is not spectacularly well written, but it does (or should) strike a powerful chord with nearly anyone in late twenties or early thirties who have ever lived to eat up whatever happiness they could grab, and wondered if there was anything worthwhile beyond rapture.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
1.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing
Dyer is a great essayist. On the evidence of this book, he is not a great novelist. What I thought profound, insightful and funny in wonderful prose in his non-fiction, is here... Read more
Published 5 months ago by Lynskey4655
1.0 out of 5 stars Good set up but disappointing
I loved the way the plot was set up and it really made you curious about what would happen next. But then, there was a plot development that I completely saw coming and that was it... Read more
Published 6 months ago by Susan
1.0 out of 5 stars Bland and Awkward Prose
I threw this book away after suffering through the first 30 or so pages. The narrative structure is awkward. The male characters are devoid of heart. Read more
Published 6 months ago by kamalakaruna
1.0 out of 5 stars Self-indulgent and boring
I was drawn in by this book after reading the first thirty pages or so. For me, the aimless strolls which Luke takes in the beginning of the novel were the most interesting parts... Read more
Published 8 months ago by Nandy
4.0 out of 5 stars Compelling But Not Compassionate
While the romp through Paris that is the center of the novel is, indeed, compelling, the central character Luke is difficult to identify with in that he totally lacks compassion. Read more
Published on May 6, 2009 by Shannon Draper-gard
5.0 out of 5 stars Got to understand how European mind works to understand the book...
I thought this book was terrific. I'm not a big fan of romantic novels, but this one got me going for a week or so. Read more
Published on August 25, 2006 by Ecaterina Smirnov
1.0 out of 5 stars Self-indulgent amateur hour
I'm hoping this is the author's first book. From the jacket descriptions and the subject matter I thought this would be a sure winner just to put me in the mood of Paris in the... Read more
Published on October 27, 2003 by Bryan Todd Whitefield
2.0 out of 5 stars Interesting - but not enough.
4 characters. Luke. Alex. Sahra. Nicole. Living in Paris. In love. Having fun. Having sex. Taking drugs. Uh-huh. What else? Not much. Read more
Published on December 7, 2001
4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent!
I thought this book was very well written. It kept my attention as many don't. All-in-all a very good read.
Published on July 14, 2001 by Sean M Sloane
1.0 out of 5 stars Weak Start So I Ditched It
The first page of this novel contains the following phrase: "The events recorded here concerned only a handful of people and, quite probably, are of interest only to those... Read more
Published on February 28, 2001 by A. Ross
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