Reviews for Paris to the Moon

The average rating for Paris to the Moon based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2007-08-24 00:00:00 Gene Fogerty I have to be honest. I bought this book because I liked the title. Then I got sucked in by the back cover. Who doesn't think the idea of running away w/ your adult family to Paris wouldn't be fantastic? Gopnik is excellent at revealing the sutle differences between life in the States and France that make up two completely seperate cultures. I felt upon finishing the book that I actually knew the secrets of French thought and behavior. Unfortunately, I now know exactly why I'd never be able to blend in perfectly - my passion for sneakers would sell me out! Entwined with the journalistic entries of his five years in Paris, Gopnik fills the pages with real life and lots of romance that one hopes for in a story about Paris. And not the couplely type of romance, but the kind that makes it possible to fall in love w/ a city. If I ever get to give my two cents in a European Cities and Culture class, I would make this part of the required reading. My favorite quote from the book because it reveals how culture is prominently defined, even in toddlers: Luke, the Gopnik's 4 yr old son, who has only lived in Paris and as such is more French than American and more French than his parents, says the following to his mother upon seeing Santa buying champagne on Christmas Eve while out for last minutes holiday touches w/ his father. "We saw Santa at Hediard. I think he was just getting a little cheap wine for the elves." You could never get even the most precocious American child to say it quite the same way. As if they're worldy and 40 at the age of 4.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-09-03 00:00:00 Abdul Bari (3.5) "When they die, Wilde wrote, all good Americans go to Paris. Some of us have always tried to get there early and beat the crowds." Gopnik, a Francophile and New Yorker writer, lived in Paris for five years in the late 1990s with his wife and son (and, towards the end of their sojourn, a newborn daughter). Like Julian Barnes's Something to Declare or Geoff Dyer's Working the Room, this is a random set of essays arising from the author's experience and interests. By choosing any subject that took his fancy at the time - whether the World Cup, a Nazi war crimes trial, fashion, or gastronomy - Gopnik gleefully flouts conventions of theme and narrative, yet still manages to convey the trajectory of his years in Paris, generally through his young son Luke's development, as in "He saw, I realized, exactly the way that after five years I spoke French, which also involved a lot of clinging to the side of the pool and sudden bravura dashes out to the deep end to impress the girls, or listeners." Gopnik is at his best when writing about food (my favorite of his books is The Table Comes First) and bureaucracy: "The French birth certificate was like the first paragraph of a nineteenth-century novel, with the baby's parents' names, their occupations, the years of their births and of their emigration, their residence, and her number, baby number 2365 born in Neuilly in 1999." It's interesting to hear about Halloween creeping into France, as it's also done in the UK. In places, though, this does feel exceptionally dated: relying on a copy shop to do the household bills; David Beckham only being engaged to Posh Spice at the time of a World Cup game. What's timeless, though, are his insights about the ambivalence of the expatriate experience, which certainly resonated for me: The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped. There are times, as one reads about the uninsured and the armed and the executed, when French anti-Americanism begins to look extremely rational. It is soup, beautiful soup, that I miss more than anything, not French soup, all puréed and homogenized, but American soup, with bits and things, beans and corn and even letters, in it. "We have a beautiful existence in Paris, but not a full life," Martha said, summing it up, "and in New York we have a full life and an unbeautiful existence." I must thank my Goodreads friend Ted Schmeckpeper for passing this book along to me.