Paris to the Moon

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Summary: Paris to the Moon
Review: This book is actually a well written easy read- that is.... The author has a sincere love affair with Paris life, his family, and the experience of transplanting oneself into a different culture. I reccomend this book for anyone who wants to be charmed by Paris through the weary eyes of an American. His vision of romantic Paris is not quite as expected, but the love affair he has with the city anyway is the best part of this book.

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Summary: Stuck in a family slideshow.
Review: Buying this book was like getting a dinner-party invitation from a friend who had just returned from an extended stay abroad in one of the world's most attractive cities.
But reading this book was like sitting in this friend's living-room, squirming with boredom and annoyance, as you're bombarded with family snapshots of his children, accompanied by an endless string of cute-kid stories. "And here's Junior learning to swim - the teacher says he's a natural. And here's Junior playing soccer - 'course Dad was a baseball player, you know. And here's Junior's little girlfriend - he's quite a hit with the ladies just like his old man."
Groan. Yawn. Get me outta here. I wanted a book about Paris, and instead I got a Baby's First Years scrapbook, occasionally interrupted by a visit to a restaurant or a fashion show or some microscopic analysis of a croissant crumb that supposedly illuminates a great and profound truth about the difference between New Yorkers and Parisians. At the end of the day, Gopnik's vision is too blinkered and self-absorbed to be of much interest to anyone other than his immediate family (and maybe not even them). Despite having spent 5 years in Paris, Gopnik really should get out more.

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Summary: Insight marred by insularity.
Review: Here's what this book is not. It's not a travelogue or Paris 101, so those seeking sightseeing tips or restaurant recommendations should look elsewhere. It's not as good as Janet Flanner and it's not as picaresque as Mayle (glad for that), but it does a competent and often entertaining job of going one level deeper into daily Parisian life - a level probably best appreciated by those familiar with Paris but aware that annual holidays are different from resident living. It's at its best when Gopnik applies his considerable skills of observation to pull out an analytical insights (French coverage of "Diana Spencer" - pointedly not "beloved Princess Diana" as the rest of the world knows her -- illuminates their disdain for the British.)

But there are liabilities here. The author prattles on far too long about his children (why do parents harbor the illusion that the rest of us find their offspring as endlessly fascinating as they do?) who, with their absurdly affected names like Luke Auden and Olivia Esme, rapidly became a grating annoyance to this reader.
Gopnik's analytics can multiply to the point they become granular and forced. And there are disappointments in what Gopnick chooses to focuses on (on the massive topic of French fashion, the best Gopnick can do is to center his essay on leering male photographers begging runway models for more skin?) and what he fails to address. One of my disappointments, as a regular Paris visitor, was that Gopnik never applied his keen eye to the profound differences between the American and French approaches to healthcare. Even a first-time visitor to Paris wonders about those green-cross pharmacies on every block -a comparison of the slash-and-drug American approach with the minimalist, homeopathic French way would been a motherlode of interest, but Gopnik instead devotes pages to, say, another tired Barney compliant.

All in all, Paris to the Moon came off as a sometimes incisive but frequently self-absorbed and smug chronicle of a man who should have realized that most of us regard Paris and Parisians as more interesting than Adam Gopnik and his son.

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Summary: Superb writing on Paris and life
Review: Adam Gopnik's "Paris to the Moon" is a collection of essays, many of which previously appeared in THE NEW YORKER, for which he has written for some years. Gopnik details not only cultural differences between France and America (he sometimes refers to his life in Manhattan as "my real life"), but gives us a great deal about his family life in general. Having spent a brief part of his childhood in Paris, he is in a unique position to compare his own experiences there to those being had by his son Luke, four years old at the time of the essays.

Gopnik has a great gift for subtle humor. While rarely poking overt fun at Parisians, he manages to show their multi-faceted character--overly serious about some things, lighthearted about others, fairly sexist (both men and women), concerned with both surface (good looks, scarves, the right hat) and depth (Jean-Paul Sartre).

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Summary: Blah Blah Blah
Review: The book gives you a unique sense of one family's view of living in Paris for 5 years but I didn't find it to be the delightful read that some did. Some terrific nuggets mixed in with a lot of self-discovery type prose that I found long-winded, but that's just mho.

Rating:
Summary: Paris to the Moon
Review: In fall 1995, Gopnick, an art and cultural critic for The New Yorker, moved to Paris with his wife and young son, Luke. His reports from the city, published regularly in the magazine, proved to be fluent and witty, delightful fodder for anyone who loves Paris or has ever dreamed of living abroad. Those pieces, collected here, constitute more than a memoir of one American's struggles to adjust to French ways (though Gopnick was not completely out of his depth, having lived briefly in Paris as a child). True, the essays take the intimate and everyday as their genesis, covering, for instance, Gopnick's attempts to sign up at a "New York-style" health club, taking Luke to puppet shows and the carousel, visiting the new Biblioth que National or the "dinosaur museum," struggling with French Christmas tree lights, and fighting to keep a favorite restaurant alive. But these are just starting points for deeper reflections on what it means to be French, to be American, and simply to be alive at the close of the 20th century. Gopnick's essays do what the best writing should do: they inform as they entertain. Highly recommended.

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Summary: Gently amusing and very insightful
Review: There is so much to like about this book that it's difficult to begin at any specific spot. Aside from the wonderful viewpoints of Parisian life offered by a true North American (that is: someone who was born in the United States and lived for many years in Canada), there is pure entertainment value in Gopnik's writing about French cooking and French restaurants--historically and contemporaneously. Renting an apartment, buying Christmas trees and strings of lights, all the things that are ordinary events on this continent are entirely different, challenging, even frustrating for Gopnik, his wife and son in Paris. But more than anything else, what I found completely engaging was the growth of Gopnik's son, Luke Auden, during the family's five years in Paris. The child is so vividly drawn, so very real, so very French in many ways and yet multi-national, that his adventures, his thoughts and words and even his little-boy "love affair" with the divine Cressida are--as represented by his father--completely enchanting.

Of his own Parisian gaffes and uncertainties, of his passions and his evolution into a true "foodie" Gopnik is refreshingly truthful. He writes beautifully, whether it's about politics, or cooking, or dining out. And, ultimately, he comes across as someone who is very aware of every nuance of the world and the people around him.

This is a lovely book. Most highly recommended.

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Summary: Interesting For Some...Boring For Others
Review: Readers are presented an American expatriate's view of Paris at the close of the twentieth century. Thankfully, he avoids the error of being another Stein/Hemmingway romantacist wanna be.

His observations will no doubt be seen as the U.S.'s response to Alexis e Tocqueville, albiet a century and a half later.

While some portions of the book are quite informative (searching for an apartment, shopping for appliances and dealing with the difference between American and French Christmas tree lights), it sometimes got a bit much for this reviewer.

However...about half way through the book it became evident that this is not just a book about Paris. It is an opportunity to witness one writer's spiritual growth. Whether telling a bedtime story, or organizing a group to save a special restaurant, the author's growth as a person is observable.

Certainly this book will not appeal to a great number of readers. That all right, though. For those who enjoy reading about personal struggles and adjustments to expatriate living, this is a fine work.

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Summary: Not Up to the Mayle Standard
Review: The title, Paris to the Moon, derives, as the author points out, from a book by Jules Verne (From the Earth to the Moon [1865]). It may also conjure up, as it did in my mind, George Melies silent masterpiece, "Le Voyage Dans La Lune (1902), with its unforgettable image of the man in the moon wincing as the rocket hits him square in the right eye. Unfortunately, this is only one of many of Gopnik's rather forced allusions, and for the most part, his prose doesn't quite measure up to his aspirations. His attempts at coming across as a reverse-crossing Alexis De Toqueville never acquire the necessary intellectual weight to be taken seriously. This leaves him in Peter Mayle territory, the French capital equivalent of the Provencal ex-pat, wending his way somewhat comically through the trails and tribulations of Gallic bureaucracy, with large dollops of cultural commentary along the way. Here again, however, the comparisons do not lend themselves favorably to Gopnik. Mayle is much better at this sort of thing. For one thing, Gopnik's anecdotes are far less amusing than Mayle's. Whereas Mayle's vignettes capture perfectly the charming idiosyncrasies of his Provencal neighbors, Gopnik's come across as recherche, almost contrived. Again like Mayle (who must at the least, have been in the back of Gopnik's mind as a model for this sort of writing), Gopnik frequently digresses in his story to discuss cultural and particularly political variants in Parisian society. Yet whereas Mayle might take off on a tangent that actually leads to some new insight into "the French character," Gopnik provides no real revelation or compelling portrait. We just get his less than insightful musings in too many instances.

The book's strong points, on the other hand, look, at first glance, as among its most glaring weaknesses. At one point in the book, he writes for several pages about a bed time story he made up for his young son. It revolves around an infant baseball player, named the kid, who becomes a pitcher for the early-century New York Giants. What starts out as gaggingly cloying, turns out to be rather inspired story telling. It also provides a very sweet, genuinely touching portrait of the relationship this father had with his little boy.

Another high mark goes to Gopnick for providing some genuinely useful information for Americans who might wish to make a prolonged sojourn in Paris. His discussion of the differences between American and French appliances and the varied assortment of outlet prongs should serve as a valuable warning to Yankees who want to follow in Stein's, Fitzgerald's and Hemingway's footsteps, as should his depiction of apartment hunting in the city of lights.

Some readers at this site have objected to the fact that Gopnik was in too privileged a position and vantage point to be somehow "authentic." This is beside the point. These were "New Yorker" articles, after all, not triple A guideposts. Though a little pseudo-intellectual at times, Gopnik does not come across as a snob.

There are shortcomings and merits to this book. As a family journal, it succeeds, as we do get a clear picture of what it is like to raise a small nuclear family (later a "choix du Roi [sp?]) in the environs of Paris. Where the book fails, is in its measure of wit, which by Maylesian standards, is sub-par.

Rating:
Summary: Acceptable, but still articulates the "dumb American" view
Review: Adam Gopnik's collection of essays is interesting for many a reason, chiefly among them the fact that he gives us a snapshot of middle-class, family-oriented Paris, with all of its small charms and treasures. In short, it is a glimpse of the people that make the city what it is. We are spared the tired gutter-poet accounts, the working class romanticizing, and the descriptions of unbridled hedonism which tend be what Americans interested in this city obsess over. It is a pleasant relief to read something by an author who does not treat Paris like some kind of boho theme park.....Nevertheless, in both his descriptive passages and his general attitudes, he still espouses the "dumb American" view. As an American myself, I must say we can do much better than this when detailing life in this fascinating city.