So we could we begin with this young lieutenant in a package ship, who's traveling up the Seine to Paris. So I thought it was important not to allow all those preconceived notions that we have of Napoleon or Marie Antoinette or Charles de Gaul, to interfere at the very beginning. So inevitably you find yourself writing about people who are quite famous, like Napoleon or Marie Antoinette.īut the point is that when you catch them there as a particular moment in the city, you're really trying to just describe them not as the person they became, but as the person they were at the time. And the problem is that in order to recreate the past, you need a lot of documentation and information. ROBB: Well, one thing I wanted to do in the book was to write about ordinary Parisians, people whose experience of the city was in some ways typical of other people's experience. Why did you choose this approach to Parisian history? And I thought it was a wonderful approach, kind of like being blindfolded at a picnic where you can hear people speaking. Youve written about Victor Hugo and Balzac, but in this book only as the tale goes on - in the first few chapters, anyway, you use this approach - only as the tale goes on do we surmise who the tale teller is. LYDEN: Youve written about France quite a bit before.
GRAHAM ROBB (Author, "Parisians, An Adventure History of Paris"): Well, thanks very much. Graham, this is truly an art of raising people from the dead and sort of principled eavesdropping. Graham Robb joins us now from Oxford, England.
None of this is fiction but it reads like the most thrilling of novels. It's history as a great masked ball of revelations. You never know by name who's speaking, but you do. In Graham Robb's new book, "Parisians, An Adventure History of Paris," the past comes to you in thundering whispers and haunting asides.
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