Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris [Unabridged] [Audible Audio Edition] Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B00II81O4M | Format: PDF, EPUB
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When Edmund White moved to Paris in 1983, leaving New York City in the midst of the AIDS crisis, he was 43 years old, couldn?t speak French, and only knew two people in the entire city. But in middle age, he discovered the new anxieties and pleasures of mastering a new culture. When he left 15 years later to take a teaching position in the U.S., he was fluent enough to broadcast on French radio and TV, and in his work as a journalist, he?d made the acquaintance of everyone from Yves Saint Laurent to Catherine Deneuve to Michel Foucault. He?d also developed a close friendship with an older woman, Marie-Claude, through which he?d come to understand French life and culture in a deeper way. The audiobook?s title evokes the Parisian landscape in the eternal mists and the half-light, the serenity of the city compared to the New York White had known (and vividly recalled in City Boy). White fell headily in love with the city and its culture: both intoxicated and intellectually stimulated. He became the definitive biographer of Jean Genet; he wrote lives of Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud; and he became a recipient of the French Order of Arts and Letters. Inside a Pearl recalls those fertile years for White. It?s a memoir which gossips and ruminates, and offers a brilliant examination of a city and a culture eternally imbued with an aura of enchantment.
Books with free ebook downloads available Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris Epub Download
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 9 hours and 9 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Audible Studios
- Audible.com Release Date: March 11, 2014
- Whispersync for Voice: Ready
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00II81O4M
Edmund White is in luck. According to him-- and he now is fluent in the language he could not speak when he moved to Paris in 1983 in part to get away from the AIDS crisis in New York City-- there is no word in French for name-dropping. Names drop on practically every page in his latest work of gossipy nonfiction INSIDE A PEARL: MY YEARS IN PARIS. (Is it name-dropping I ask if you are as well-known as some of the people whose names you scatter in your narrative.) Mr. White either is friends with, knows or at least has met dozens of the famous or near-famous: Yves Saint Laurent, Lauren Bacall, Catherine Deneuve, the writers Peter Taylor, Salman Rushdie, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Julian Barnes, Raymond Carver, Ian McEwan, Louise Erdrich, Bruce Chatwin, Martin Amis, Stephen Fry, Alan Hollinghurst, John Hawkes et al. The list seems endless.
Mr. White says in the beginning of this memoir that he "discovered" France through Marie-Claude de Brunhoff whom he met at a party in New York in 1975. Over the years they became good friends and she is the one person with her white cigarette holder and flowing skirts that shows up again and again while other characters come and go, among them his many sex partners and lovers. He figures that by the early 1980's he had slept with 3,000 men and says later in the book that "I had lots of sex in Paris. Like everyone." And there apparently is no detail of his sex life too private to write about. But there is so much more here as Mr.
Edmund .White has survived to become an eminence grise of gay literature with novels like "A Boy's Own Story,""The Beautiful Room Is Empty" and "The Farewell Symphony." He has also written biographies of Jean Genet and Arthur Rimbaud, wide ranging books of cultural essays and even a travel tome about Paris and Parisians called "The Flaneur." His newest work is the most recent in his series of memoirs named "Inside a Pearl: My Years In Paris."
As always his prose is impeccable. Here is a sample, a description of a village in the French equivalent of The Hamptons.
"In the center of the village stood a church that had a bumpy, tapering steeple, half black and half white for maximum contrast and visibility for those at sea. Around the church were the post office, a newsstand, a cafe, and a snack bar. Down by the harbor were a couple of good restaurants and a shop selling expensive nautical wear and equipment (such as a brass circular compass and cut-glass liqueur bottles set in a mahogany caddy that would always right itself when the boat was severely listing to one side).
But after several memoirs it seems like Mr. White has actually run out of interest in writing about himself. Self-deprecatingly he writes that "I was better known in Britain as a writer than anywhere else, and of course that was agreeable. And yet I wasn't a caustic eminence grise like Gore Vidal but rather a pudgy, easygoing but witty guy like millions of others."
As such much of the memoir reads like name dropping - names that you'd need a PhD in Literature and/or Art to recognize. Too often name dropping like this is done to prop up the writer's own ego and credentials.
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