MICK MCSHANE is roused by a band whose socialism laces every line of every song with commitment and raw passion
Latest editorial
The universe of a Paris bus ride
Mining the momentous in mundane journeys through French capital
Route 92
New releases from Mountain, Soul Asylum and Michael McDermott
ALEX HALL is disgusted by the misuse of ‘emotional narratives’ to justify uninformed geo-political prejudice
SUE TURNER welcomes a thoughtful, engaging book that lays bare the economic realities of global waste management
JOHN GREEN welcomes an insider account of the achievements and failures of the transition to democracy in Portugal
SIMON PARSONS applauds an imaginative and absorbing updating of Strindberg’s classic
PETER MASON is enthralled by an assembly of objects, ancient and modern, that have lain in the mud of London’s river
No. 91/92: Notes on a Parisian commute
by Lauren Elkin
Les Fugitives, £8.99
OVER a period of seven months in 2015, Franco-US writer Lauren Elkin noted particulars of her bus journeys to and from work in central Paris.
The project was intended as a means of observing the world through her phone’s Notes app, “rather than to use my phone to distract myself from the world.” Taking as her guidance a focus on the “infra-ordinary” as set out by Georges Perec, founder of the “workshop of potential literature” Oulipo, the goal was to pay attention to the everyday micro events of a mundane journey in building a record of experience.
Elkin is known for the 2016 bestseller Flaneuse: Women Walk the City, her critique of male domination of the written city. Here she becomes a Flanenbus, well prepared for the journey.
More from this author
FIONA O’CONNOR steps warily through a novel that skewers many of the exposed flanks of the over-privileged
A uncomfortably misogynistic authorial voice that sometimes seems to lack insight troubles FIONA O’CONNOR
FIONA O’CONNOR recommends an accessible and entertaining survey of post-war French philosophy and its relation to contemporary capitalism
FIONA O’CONNOR admires a collection that is a riposte to the armies of developers, estate agents, private capital speculators and their marketeers
