Eric Hazan, author of The Invention of Paris, will be speaking at the Alliance Française in Dublin next Tuesday 21 February at 6.30pm. More information here.
Click here for my review of the book and here for my interview with Hazan, conducted when the English language edition of The Invention of Paris was published.
I think Paris had a very particular growth: it grew like an onion, with a series of concentric layers. And that gives a quite special geography to the city, which is not exactly the same as it is here [London] for instance. And what was striking, when I began to work [on the book] was how sharp can be the border between one quartier and another one. Elsewhere in the city, it’s less precise, and even there can be transition – small pieces of the city – and all that makes, when you walk through the city, a very special psychogeography. I think it’s because the layers are so densely connected; there is this extremely dense – much more than here – there is nothing like what we call in French terrain vague: space, imprecise, where there is nothing, with not exact borders.