Edmund White: The Flaneur: The writer and the city

By GILBERT WONG*

There can be no better guide to a city than a resident, and even better if that resident is an outsider who views his or her adopted home with a stranger's eyes.

Novelist and biographer Edmund White lived in Paris during the 1980s, and came to know some of its precincts intimately. The word "flaneur"of the title is French for loiterer or stroller, exemplified by Charles Baudelaire and the writer Louis Sebastien Mercier, who produced the 12-volume Picture of Paris (1781 to 1789), which covered everything from the 30,000 prostitutes and the 6000 children abandoned each year to the tradespeople, police and aristocracy.

White's take on his adopted city is understandably biased toward the literary, with good material on Colette and Genet. Perhaps because White is gay, he focuses on the dispossessed outsiders who inhabit Paris - the Jews, the Africans and the gay inhabitants of the Marais area.

The idea of the flaneur is particularly appealing in Paris, a city that can be known only by walking it. While White's perambulations are random, he maintains a neat narrative that brings a wealth of disparate material together and inserts his own experiences, namedropping shamelessly about his encounters with eminent intellectuals such as Michel Foucault.

Next time you're in Paris, by all means take a guidebook to sort out restaurants and galleries and charming places to stay. But to get a real feel for the city, White's book is essential packing. It's a great idea and only the first in a series in which more writers will take on their cities. I can't wait for the others.

Bloomsbury

$32.95

* Gilbert Wong is the Herald books editor.