Book review: Paris to the Moon
Gopnik, Adam. Paris to the Moon. (Random House, 2000)
Adam Gopnik is a writer for the New Yorker. In 1995, he and his wife moved from New York to Paris with their infant son and lived there for four or five years; this book consists of essays that appeared in the magazine as "Letters from Paris," plus a few longer pieces. Disclaimer: I have come to dislike and/or distrust Gopnik from his book reviews in the New Yorker because he is sloppy, careless, or just plain ignorant in his facts-not about the book he's reviewing at the time, but in his comparisons to and judgments of other books in the same essay. But on reading this collection, I discovered that I had read and enjoyed, and still vaguely remembered, some of the "Letters from Paris" at the time without connecting them with the careless book critic.
In this book, Gopnik is still careless about details; he admits as much in the whole Christmas lights debacle, and he promises his son there will be lions and bears at the Cirque du Soleil (and then he has the cheek to twit the French about their attitude towards fact checking!). He just loves his long run-on sentences full of commas: the very first sentence of the book (see, I did not have to look hard for an example) runs, "Not long after we moved to Paris, in the fall of 1995, my wife, Martha, and I saw, in the window of a shop on the rue Saint-Sulpice, a nineteenth-century engraving, done in the manner, though I'm now inclined to think not from the hand, of Daumier." And I have real doubts about how normal and well-adjusted the son is going to grow up (see "The Rookie" especially)-we watch him learn how to ride the carousel in the Luxembourg Gardens in the book, but he must be driving by now in the real world.
Two woofs overall: I will allow some parts were positively interesting, but some parts were not and mostly Gopnik comes across as awfully pleased with his precious insights about France, the universe, and everything.
Adam Gopnik is a writer for the New Yorker. In 1995, he and his wife moved from New York to Paris with their infant son and lived there for four or five years; this book consists of essays that appeared in the magazine as "Letters from Paris," plus a few longer pieces. Disclaimer: I have come to dislike and/or distrust Gopnik from his book reviews in the New Yorker because he is sloppy, careless, or just plain ignorant in his facts-not about the book he's reviewing at the time, but in his comparisons to and judgments of other books in the same essay. But on reading this collection, I discovered that I had read and enjoyed, and still vaguely remembered, some of the "Letters from Paris" at the time without connecting them with the careless book critic.
In this book, Gopnik is still careless about details; he admits as much in the whole Christmas lights debacle, and he promises his son there will be lions and bears at the Cirque du Soleil (and then he has the cheek to twit the French about their attitude towards fact checking!). He just loves his long run-on sentences full of commas: the very first sentence of the book (see, I did not have to look hard for an example) runs, "Not long after we moved to Paris, in the fall of 1995, my wife, Martha, and I saw, in the window of a shop on the rue Saint-Sulpice, a nineteenth-century engraving, done in the manner, though I'm now inclined to think not from the hand, of Daumier." And I have real doubts about how normal and well-adjusted the son is going to grow up (see "The Rookie" especially)-we watch him learn how to ride the carousel in the Luxembourg Gardens in the book, but he must be driving by now in the real world.
Two woofs overall: I will allow some parts were positively interesting, but some parts were not and mostly Gopnik comes across as awfully pleased with his precious insights about France, the universe, and everything.