Paris Dreambook: An Unconventional Guide to the Splendor and Squalor of the City (Vintage Departures) [Idioma Inglés] - Softcover

Over the centuries, the figure of the dreaming
provincial has provided Paris with some of its most
enduring subversive literary characters - from
Restif de la Bretonne's roaming peasant to Louis
Aragon's classic surrealist rustic in Paris Peasant.
Following in this savage and satirical tradition,
Lawrence Osborne gives us a peasant for the Jin de
siecle - a dreamer wary of elevated comparisons, but
one who prowls the sidestreets and underbelly of
his adopted city with a kind of genius.
In his dreambook are recorded the city's rituals of
food and sex, the corrupted landscapes of the
industrial suburbs, and the inadvertent exoticism of
the Metro, the squalor of St Denis and the
obliterating, brutal cleanliness of the Turkish bath.
He skulks through Clichy, where nostalgia and
voyeurism collide, and predicts Futuropolis, a
shattering vision of the City of Light. It is a book
which compels the reader to follow the byways of a
startling imagination - by turns exuberant,
aggressive, witty and morbid.