We know the author for The first sip of beer or I’m going to pass for an old fool, Sundborn or Days of light. Philippe Delerm is an author, but even more, he is the inventor of a genre of which he is the only representative, “the literary snapshot”. It has just been released at Seuil New York sans New York. How to talk about the cities that we have not visited? This is a question that the critic Pierre Bayard could have asked and to which Philippe Delerm provides a full and jubilant answer: by composing a collection of short texts of all his approaches to the fantasized city. And that’s what he did!
New York sans New York
Loving New York and never wanting to go there: Philippe Delerm made this idea a lifelong passion, shining like a glass marble jealously guarded in the bottom of his pocket. In his book, he reviews in turn these photographs of the skyline and the skyscrapers that tame the sky; the memory of friends returning from a trip with addresses of restaurants where he would never dine; a street in Greenwich Village seen on a Dylan record cover; Washington Square Park where a novel takes place. So many tiny dreams for a capital city. So why go there? Does he wonder? We run the risk of find in New York less than New York is his answer.
When you are yourself an expatriate in New York, aren’t you intrigued by a book about a city in which the author has never set foot? What is the place for clichés? Especially since New York is a megalopolis in perpetual change and whose face has changed with the pandemic… Perhaps the restaurants they are talking about have closed following the crisis, Greenwich Village has also changed, just like the skyline that keeps getting denser.
Definitely worth reading to get to the bottom of it. Or at least to discover the fantasized version of the author for the city of New York.
–
–
