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Revelatory walks through the city of light and revolutions
[Benh Lieu Song/Creative Commons]
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JAMIE BRITTON recommends that we all buy at least two copies of a remarkable book of poems
A Walk Through Paris: A Radical Exploration
by Eric Hazan
(Verso, £10.39)
ONE of my great pleasures when residing in Paris was walking through the city. I lived close to the Gard du Nord in the immigrant area of the Goutte d'Or, first made famous in Emile Zola's novels and evocatively described in Eric Hazan's A Walk Through Paris.
It only took an hour or so, heading south, to reach the Seine and the epicentre of “the city of light” and over time, as I grew more familiar with the city's topography, I'd drift away from the imposing Haussmann boulevards into the local neighbourhoods, a limitless source of ever-intriguing discoveries of cités, impasses and hotels, particularly in working-class areas which, unlike in London, are just about resisting the gentrifying tides of “regeneration” that have decanted local populations from its centre.
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