I wavered between a 3 and a 4 on this one because there are so many things I like about the book but it didn't always hold my attention. The writing is beautiful and there are times when you feel like you are transported directly to Paris. He looks at things from different perspectives and is really funny. The issue is that the topics continually change and I was bored with some of them. Overall though, the book was an experience. A really good one!

While there were some clever bits in this book (like how the writer tried to go sign up for unlimited access to a gym and the Parisian gym owners did not even know how to respond--they had never heard of anyone wanting to go the gym everyday), the bulk of it felt like jumbled (and not all together interesting) leftovers from his New Yorker submissions. A good read when you just want a chapter at a time. While in chronological order, each chapter could stand alone. I finished it because I felt I had to....

"After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn't be carousels if it weren't so."

"And the slightly amused, removed feeling always breaks down as you realize that you don't want to be so lofty and Olympian- or rather, that being lofty and Olympian carries within it, by tradition and precedent, the habit of wishing you could be down there in the plain, taking sides. Even the gods, actually looking down from Olympus in amusement, kept hurtling down to get laid or slug somebody."

"It is just fun. Fun is the magic American word (Our motto 'Let's have fun!' is met by the French motto 'Let's be amused!')"

"It is as if we were wishing that the rituals of sex, those moments of painful sizing up, which begin with the thought That's a nice dress, could pass by more consequentially, slowly- love walking down a runway instead of just meeting you outside the movie theater."

"There is, I believe now, a force in stories, words in motion, that either drives them forward past things into feelings or doesn't. Sometimes the words fly right over the fence and all the way out to the feelings."

"Loss, like distance, gives permission for romance. In a better-ordered Verona, Romeo and Juliet would have grown up to be just another couple at dinner."

"...I could sense that a bond, a romance had begun between Luke and Cressida, in the simple sense that the unstated had emerged from the informal. I recognized the signs: It lay not in their having fun together but in their not needing to have fun together..."

"He was struggling with the oldest romantic-erotic question. Was there more pleasure to be found in sharing Cressida's company or in feeling the power that he held by making her suffer from his absence? More pleasure to be found in sharing joy or in denying joy, in knowing that he now possessed the power to make her miserable, change her entire emotional state, simply by not being there?"

This book is really fun, once you get about 50 pages into it. It helps if you have enjoyed? interacting with French bureaucracy. The author has a talent for making introspective observations about day-to-day life in the French capital.

Just a nice quiet memoir of a few years spent in Paris with his family which included a young son. The comparisons between how it's done in Paris conflicted with experience in NY. They moved back to NYC with the birth of their baby girl. It appears the boy was headed to being more French.

I loved this book when I first read it about ten years ago. This time, not only was I murmuring, "Oh, lucky ducks, this family is in Paris," but I was also gushing, "Yes, yes, I went there, too!"

I don't remember exactly when I read this book; must've been around 2004-2006, either before or after I spent a week in Paris in the fall of 2005. It was a fantastic read. Gopnik evokes Paris in a way that makes you feel like you're there alongside his family, and leaves you missing the city when you're done.

جستار آخر و جستار اطلاعات رو بیشتر از بقیه دوست داشتم.

On a re-reading streak, and after having just finished Gopnik's other essay collection, thought I'd take myself on a vacation of the nostalgic imagination. Serendipity strikes me again: upon opening the book the other evening, I found my boarding pass to the flight that officially relocated me to Paris. If that was not enough, it just so happened that this slipped out from between the pages exactly eight years to the DAY- February 26- that I took the trip that changed my life forever.

Does this sort of thing happen to many others?



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Read just upon my own return to the United States, Gopnik's own experiences touched feelings of romance, confusion, fantasy and frustration that were (and still are) quite tender...there's just something about the tale of an American in Paris that never loses its freshness of spirit, its fluttering heartbeat, its wide-eyed world-weariness.

n  We breathe in our first language and swim in our second.n

Starting to show its age, but remains a rich and worthwhile portrait of expat (young) family life in Paris. Told interestingly in the context of the author's work (writer for the New Yorker) and life with young children.

Found the observations about the French state as an intermediary between the nation and the republic illuminating; the 'nation' defined as the repository of racial memory, beloved of conservatives, and the republic defined as the repository of universal rights, beloved of liberals. The state in France helps these two often opposing forces to coexist by keeping both in check. In my infrequent visits, I indeed find France quite unique compared to the many places I've called home (NYC, Southwestern U.S.A., Japan, Singapore, Philadelphia, the UK) in that the state maintains what Gopnik describes as the official, disinterested tradition of service; it means the functioning and unity of the country. I wish the US could incorporate that stance; the state is inevitably politicized and thus weaponized in the US.

I don't agree with this overly-simplistic observation, but recognize that it is how many Europeans view the average American: Most Americans draw their identities from the things they buy, while the French draw theirs from the jobs they do.

Our three boys are American-Japanese and grew up during our long series of expatriate assignments; each resemble Gopnik's description of children, including his, who grow up this way: Achingly polite, and watchful and skilled, adult, and guarded. ...left with a sense of being doubly islanded.

I learned about this book when my niece Anna gave me a copy with the recommendation of how she loved the book and authors writing style (writes for the New Yorker). I quickly found myself savoring my time reading each of the essays that focus on different aspect of authors 5 years living as a NYC transplant in Paris from 1995 - 2000 with wife and son (daughter added to the family just before return).

Adam Gopnik captures the small details of life so deftly.....example is when he describes their experience and what they find when furnishing their place in Paris with chairs, rugs and dressers at a flea market......"The feeling is totally different from an antiques fair in America; this is the attic of a civilization."

He describes his toddler son In a stroller while shopping in a shop and hearing a favorite song, "he rises from his stroller, a cobra in mittens, and sways solemnly back and forth." Anyone who has had a toddler become fascinated by something when in a stroller will recognize that movement......I just never had it put in such perfectly descriptive terms.
This book is filled with such descriptions that capture experience of an American in Paris.
Now I am ready to go to Paris.

This collection of essays is lovely. When author and New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik and his wife Martha have their first baby they decide to leave New York and fulfill a dream of living in Paris before Luke reaches school age. Their adventures in the city are both incredibly romantic and practical as they go about setting up life in a foreign city. Taken together they are a wonderful exploration of French culture. Gopnik has a wonderful sense of humor and I particularly enjoyed his attempts to find a gym in Paris, keep Barney out of Luke's life, and swimming at The Ritz. I loved his many descriptions of food, cooking, and cafe culture particularly his tale about trying to save his favorite brasserie, The Balzar. I was very interested in the differences his family encountered in having a baby in Paris when his second child is born there. Through his writing I am in love with the Luxembourg Gardens and can't wait to take the most beautiful walk in the world. I love the title which is based on an old poster he discovered showing passengers boarding a train in Paris that is headed straight to the moon. Ah....the earthly city that is only a short train ride from the heavens.