From the NS archive: City of unsafe dreams
10 October 1997: Paris unfolds like a multi-layered novel, its characters and narratives weaving tales of beauty and ugliness, pleasure and hardship.
In this “Letter from Here and There”, published in the New Statesman in 1997, the novelist Rose Tremain considers her life-long love affair with the city of Paris. It is, she understands, an unsettling city that, she quotes the artist David Gentleman as saying, “makes one reassess one’s own ingrained and comfortable habits, views and assumptions”. Tremain goes on to explore just how Paris does “this moving and shaking”: it’s a place where visual narrative is alive and well, she writes; where invention and surprise is everywhere; and a place where shamefully ugly and scarred buildings – and stories – lie too.