Paris to the Moon

Hi you all, darlings of my life!

I've just finish my school semester and this is a total relief. The two last books I've just read were amazing. So, I'll start with one of them and you'll know the other on Sunday. I want to post more regularly now: let's say at each three or four days.

"The differences are tiny and real. Cultures don't really encode things. They include things, and leave things out."

Adam Gopnik has a highly reputation as a journalist of the New Yorker. In 1995, his first child was born in New York, and his wife and him decided that they want to live in Paris in order that their child can have a beautiful existence. The premise is strange. What weird parents would do a thing like that to their child: expatriate him from his family and friends before he can even know them! But whatever, I enjoyed the book. From Paris, during five years, Gopnik will write a column in the New Yorker about topics of his life in France. Paris to the Moon is a compilations of those reports, with four more never handed, and a first chapter (titled as the book) that has been written after.

Gopnik.

It sure is a first narrator who completely knows where he comes from, what he is doing, why he is doing it, and where he will go. What is strange about this book is that even if the narrator is a complete American with his capitalist view of the world and his touristic ways to do things outside his country, he is so full of love for his child, for his wife, for life in itself that it is really difficult to not like his writing. In fact... he is so cheesy. Two examples:

The first is when one of his friend (back in New York, on one of Gopnik visits for Christmas times) asks him why they lives in Paris, Gopnik writes:

"So, Paris. 'We want him [his child] to grow up someplace where everything he sees is beautiful,' we said, and though we realized that the moment our backs were turned our friends' eyes were rolling, we didn't care. We knew that our attempt to insist on a particular set of pleasures for our kid−to impose on our child−might be silly or inappropriate or even doomed. We couldn't help it, entirely. The romance of your child's childhood may be the last romance you can give up."

Isn't it cheesy? Is it gonna work? I mean, is his kid gonna like his life in Paris? Will he take Paris as his home? Or New York? Grown-up, will he find it as romanced as his father had?

The second is that through out his writing he tries to put words on how his country is seen in France and why, but even if he do sees the truth behind some assertions, he just can't bear it. So, to sublime it maybe, he'll gonna transform it in fictions such as comparing Americanism with a T. rex.

Okay, maybe I'm psychoanalyzing Gopnik a little too much, but one thing is sure: this book is refreshing, funny, silly sometimes, but oh-how-really-humane. Even if his aristocratic life deludes him on some aspects of Paris, he nevertheless expresses the will of human being to overcome differences and to enjoy life together.

Paris to the Moon's graphical view given in the book.

I like the way his wife presents their return in New York, concluding the book on a kind of reflexion about what exactly home should be:

"We have a beautiful existence in Paris, but not a full life," Martha said, summing it up, "and in New York, we have a beautiful life and an unbeautiful existence."

Weirdly, I think they're right. You can have only two choices in life: one is to stay right where you are and feel the love and the needs of the ones whom are important for you, the other is to fly where wind brings you, discover and keep on learning about the beauty of diversity. The first one is the easy choice; the second is the difficult controversial one, but that's the one where romance takes place. What do you think?

Just another silly, but so cute moment in his child's childhood in Paris.

Recommended if you want to see Paris through the eyes of an American, if you have a great sense of humor, and if you want to truly know some differences between two cultures that have been at the top of the international economy.

Don't be shy: write a comment! I need to know how you like this post and this blog. Have you read this book? If yes, what were your feelings about it? If not, would you like to?