An NYRB Classics Original
Jean-Paul Clebert was a boy from a respectable middle-class family who ran away from school, joined the French Resistance, and never looked back. Making his way to Paris at the end of World War II, Clebert took to living on the streets, and in "Paris Vagabond," a so-called aleatory novel assembled out of sketches he jotted down at the time, he tells what it was like. His gallery of faces and cityscapes on the road to extinction is an astonishing depiction of a world apart a Paris, long since vanished, of the poor, the criminal, and the outcast and a no less astonishing feat of literary improvisation: Its long looping breathless sentences, streetwise, profane, lyrical, incantatory, are an adventure in their own right. Praised on publication by the great novelist and poet Blaise Cendrars and embraced by the young Situationists as a kind of manual for living off the grid, "Paris Vagabond" here published with the starkly striking photographs of Clebert s friend Patrice Molinard is a raw and celebratory evocation of the life of a city and the underside of life."