Book Reading: Luc Sante's The Other Paris

On Wednesday evening I rode the subway down to the Village and then walked through Washington Square Park, where a holiday tree lighting ceremony was in progress under the arch, to NYU's Maison Francaise to hear Luc Sante give a reading from his most recent book, The Other Paris.

I'd read Sante's Low Life decades ago when it was first published.  As someone who is himself fourth generation NYC Irish - according to an 1861 census, my great-great grandfather had a shoe repair business on Greene Street only blocks from where the reading took place - I loved the gritty ambiance Sante captured so well in his book.  It covered much the same ground as Asbury's The Gangs of New York but was much more evocative, without ever attempting to romanticize its subject, in recounting the nefarious exploits of the nineteenth century underworld.  At the time I read it many reminders of those days were still to be found in pre-gentrified Manhattan.  The building that had once housed McGurk's Suicide Hall, for example, still stood dilapidated on Bowery just north of Houston.  All that has since been swept away, of course, along with the old ethnic neighborhoods as the city has been made over into an upscale shopping mall and its character destroyed.

Although I haven't yet read The Other Paris, I anticipated that it would approach the City of Lights in much the same manner as had been used in the earlier work on New York, and Sante more or less confirmed this before beginning the reading by referring to the book as Low Life Paris.  That was fine with me.  I've traveled a great deal, but I've never cared for the brightly lit tourist spots where Americans huddle with one another, too timid to explore the dark side streets where no one speaks English.  I used to love walking through Paris at night.  Wandering along the boulevards, I tried to imagine what the ancient city must have been like before Haussmann's renovation transformed it into a modern metropolis.  Unfortunately, since Paris has now gentrified to almost the same degree as New York, I no longer visit there.

To my surprise, the reading was much more crowded than I'd anticipated.  The large room at Maison Francaise was packed to the point where it was standing room only.  Sante read from the book for about a half hour.  He has a deep sonorous voice that was well suited to the subject matter.  His prose is rich in imagery and makes free use of descriptive adjectives as it details, for example, the history of the "Zone" and the ragpickers who once made their home there. The audience was very appreciative and gave him a loud round of applause when he'd finished.

Afterwards, during the question and answer period, I asked if, as a teacher of photography history, he saw any equivalence in what he had attempted in his book and what Brassaï had accomplished on a visual level in Paris de Nuit.  Sante responded first by saying that he had not used any of Brassaï's photographs in his book because the photographer's estate was a "bear" to deal with.  He also reminded us that many of Brassaï's most iconic images were staged (a point Alain Sayag also emphasized in his monograph) but acknowledged that Brassaï was the "patron saint" of The Other Paris.

After the reading had concluded, I approached Sante to thank him for comments he had once made about some photographs I had years before sent him via an unsolicited email.  Although I only spoke to him for about ten seconds, he was extremely gracious.