Paris: The Novel

Edward Rutherfurd, “Paris: The Novel” Ballantine Paperbacks, 2014, 805 pp.

Rutherfurd is a well-known author who, many claim, writes like Michener, using multigenerational families to trace the story through the centuries.  However, I have read many of Michener’s books and found “Paris” by Rutherfurd not up to Michener’s inclusion of historical detail.  One exception is Rutherfurd’s excellent job of describing the intricacies of the Eiffel Tower construction.  But he then only briefly alludes to the details of the French Revolution, the 1870s war, the Paris Commune, Haussmann’s tearing up of city streets to impose the boulevards we see today, and so forth.  

The book mostly stays centered in the city of Paris from the building of Notre Dame, the court of Versailles, the impressionists, and the French Resistance during WWII.  Readers follow the aristocratic de Cygne family, the merchants in the Blanchard family, the working-class Gascons, and the bad-guys in the Le Sourd family through all 805 pages.  Even though the book covers many centuries, it mostly focuses on the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.  However, the book is too much soap opera with too little exploration of the history of the various eras.  I had read a previous book by this author about the Irish Republic back in 2006, before I began my reviews, and I think that book was rather good.  But I left no notes to myself describing my thoughts. 

My Notes:

Pg. 538:  The great influenza epidemic of 1918 and 1919 killed more people than even the Black Death in the 1300s.  In Britain, a quarter million people died; in France, nearly half a million; in Canada, fifty thousand; and, in India seventeen million.  Around the world, of those who caught the flu, between ten and twenty percent died.  In the US, as a result of the flu, life expectancy fell by ten years.

Pg. 592:  Explanation of the Arrondissments

Soon after the French Revolution the inner parts of Paris were divided into twelve arrondissments.  But in 1860, the whole of Paris was divided into a new set of twenty arrondissments.  They start with the Louvre area and the western part of the Ile de la Cite: that’s the First Arrondissment.  Then they continue in a clockwise spiral, the first four on the Right Bank.  The Third contains the Temple, the Marias is mainly in the Fourth.  Then you cross the river to the Fifth, which is the Latin Quarter, the Sixth, which is the Luxembourg Gardens area, and the Seventh, which is cold but rich and includes Les Invalides and the Eiffel Tower.  Back across the river, you’re in the huge area that runs south to north from the river right up to the Parc Monceau, and west to east from the Arc de Triomphe, right down the Champs-Elysees to the Madeleine and the Opera.  That’s the Eighth.

Then you go around the city again.  The Ninth to the Twelfth Arrondissments are on the Right Bank—the Twelfth runs out from the Bastille, along the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Antoine to the old Vincennes gateway.  Then to the Left Bank: the Thirteenth, the Fourteenth, which is Montparnasse, and the Fifteenth. 

Across the river again for the last five.  The Sixteenth is long and runs right up the west side of the city to the Arc de Triomphe and the avenue de la Grande-Armee.  The Bois de Boulogne lies beyond it.  There are old villages like Passy, where Ben Franklin lived, in the Sixteenth, and the avenue Victor Hugo.  Above that, on the northwest edge of the city is the Seventeenth, with the old village of Neuilly to the west of it.  The Eighteenth is the top of the city.  It contains Clichy and Montmartre.  Then on the outer northeastern edges of the city are the Nineteenth, which contains the Buttes-Chaumont Park, and the twentieth, which is the working-class district of Belleville, but also has the Cemetery of Pere Lachaise.