Paris Trance

by Geoff Dyer

Overview

People talk about love at first sight, about the way that men and women fall for each other immediately, but there is also such a thing as friendship at first sight.

Luke moves to Paris with the idea of writing a novel but things get in the way. He becomes friends with a fellow expatriate, Alex; then he falls in love with Nicole. Alex meets Sahra, and the two couples form an intimacy that changes their lives. As they discover the clubs and cafés of the eleventh arrondissement, the four become inseparable, united by deeply held convictions about dating strategies, tunneling in P.O.W. films, and, crucially, the role of the Styrofoam cup in action movies. Experiencing the exhilarating highs of Ecstasy and sex, they reach a peak of rapture-the comedown from which is unexpected and devastating.

In this book, Geoff Dyer fixes a dream of happiness-and its aftermath-with photographic precision. Boldly erotic and hauntingly elegiac, comic and romantic, Paris Trance confirms Dyer as one of England's most original and talented writers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312429447
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	03/30/2010
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Geoff Dyer is the author of Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, among other novels, and several nonfiction books. He won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2012 for Otherwise Known as the Human Condition. He lives in Los Angeles.

Read an Excerpt

When Luke came to Paris with the intention of writing a book based on his experiences of living – as he grandly and naively conceived it – ‘in exile’, he was twenty-six years old (‘a fine age for a man,’ according to Scott Fitzgerald). As far as I know, he made absolutely no progress with this book, abandoning it – except in moments of sudden, drunken enthusiasm – in the instant that he began leading the life intended to serve as its research, its first draft. By the time we met, at the Garnier Warehouse, this book had assumed the status of a passport or travel visa: something which, by enabling him to leave one country and pass into another, had served its purpose and could be, if not discarded, then stored away and ignored. So it’s fallen to me to tell his story, or at least the part of it with which I am familiar. Our story, in fact, for by recounting this part of my friend’s life I am trying to account for my own, for my need to believe that while something in Luke tugged him away from all that he most loved, from all that made him happiest, it is his life – and not mine – which is exemplary, admirable, even enviable.

            The events recorded here concerned only a handful of people and, quite probably, are of interest only to those people. Especially since ‘story’ is almost certainly the wrong word. Whatever makes events into a story is entirely mission from what follows. It may well be that what urges me to preserve these events in the way I have – the only way I could – is exactly what stops them becoming a story.

            Luke arrived in Paris at one of the worst possible times, in mid-July, when the city was preparing to close down for August. Parisians claim this is the best part of the year – it’s easy to park, they say (after a certain amount of time in a city the parking is all you care about) – but for someone who had just arrived it was the worst. The only people around were tourists and those forced to cater for them. Many shops and restaurants were shut and the few that were open closed far earlier than usual. Luke had rented a horrible apartment in the First arrondissement. On paper it had sounded perfect: right in the middle of the city, a few minutes’ walk from the Louvre, the Arcades, and other famous tourist sights. Unfortunately that’s all there was: museums and tourist sights. The temporal heart of the city, the part that makes it what it is today – as opposed to preserving what had been magnificent in the eighteenth century, or mythically bohemian in the 1920s – had moved east into the Eleventh, close to what had once been the edge of town.

            The apartment itself was a stained place with a sad curtain separating the sleeping area from the living area and nothing to separate the living area from the smells of the cooking area (the cooker itself comprised two hot plates, electric, one of which warmed up only reluctantly). It was the kid of apartment where, if possible, you avoided touching anything. The surfaced of the cooking area – you couldn’t call it a kitchenette, let alone a kitchen – were all sticky. Even the worn linoleum floor was sticky. The fridge had never been defrosted and so the ice-box was just that: a box of furry ice in the depths of which, preserved like at thousand-year-old body in a glacier, could just be glimpsed the greenish packaging of a bag of frozen peas. Years of unventilated steam had made the paint in the bathroom bubble and peel. There was mould on the walls. Clothes hung up to dry on the cord above the bath never did. The shower curtain was grimy, the toilet seat warped, possibly dangerous. There were yellow-brown cigarette burns on the flush. To stop the taps dripping Luke had to twist them so hard he expected the pipes to snap. The window in the living area – the only window in the place – has not been washed for a long time. In a few years it would be indistinguishable from the wall. Already it was so grimed with pollution that it seemed to suck light out of the apartment like an extractor. An extent of patterned material had been stretched over the lumpy sofa but as soon as anyone sat down (Luke himself essentially), it became untucked so that the cigarette-scarred arms and blotched back were again revealed. The only stylish touch was provided by a black floor lamp with a halogen bulb and foot-adjustable dimmer switch. By keeping the light turned as low as possible Luke sought to keep at bay the simple truth that it was an ugly sofa in an ugly, sticky apartment in the middle of a neighborhood that was really a mausoleum. At intervals he was filled with rage – immigrant’s rage – that Madame Carachos had had the nerve to rent this dump to him. On arriving in the city he had turned up at her lavish apartment and handed over a wad of bills to cover the rent for the two months they had agreed upon. They had taken a coffee together and then Madame Carachos, like everyone else, had left the city to the tourists, to those who could not afford to leave, to Luke.

Editorial Reviews

Entrancing . . . I can't think of a recent novel that better describes the scarily charged beginning of a love affair.” —The New York Times Book Review

“A beautifully composed rave-generation rhapsody . . . In prose dripping with eroticism and aching with melancholy, Dyer masterfully dissects the vicissitudes of twenty-something love.” —The Sunday Times (London)

“Witty and sexy and experimental.” —Lucinda Ballantyne, The Boston Globe

“Absorbing and darkly romantic . . . However it's labeled—as a novel thick with essay point, and old-fashioned story in postmodern dress, or a fiction that contains its own dissertation—Paris Trance is a haunting work.” —Tom Nolan, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

“Tender is the Night for the Ecstasy Age.” —Tim Pears, author of In the Place of Fallen Leaves

“A beautiful, remarkable book about sad, unremarkable lives.” —Ian Sansom, The Guardian (UK)

From the Publisher

"Whatever makes events into a story is almost entirely missing from what follows," claims the narrator of this alluring pseudo-memoir of a blissful interlude lost and remembered. Fashionable fin-de-si cle lack of faith in the cohesion of experience or the ability of language to contain it detracts nothing from the lyrical intelligence of Dyer's (Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence) wittily British "story" of two men playing expat in Paris--one of whom, Alex, is the unstated narrator, though he refers to himself in the third person. The story is this: 27-year-old Luke Barnes has left England for Paris in order to write a novel, but life overtakes his plans. He finds a friend in Alex, who shares his fascination with film--a medium with the capacity, like music, to repeat itself endlessly. Luke meets and falls in love with Nicole, a beautiful Yugoslavian finishing her studies in Paris; Alex's partner is Sahra, an interpreter also new to the city. The two couples spend their time in search of the ultimate experience, the eternal "now." They vacation together, experiment with sex and drugs and go to dance clubs where the trance-like music prescribes "no distance or direction." Inevitably, ecstasy loses its edge, and as if compelled to enact the ending of one of his beloved films, Luke moves away. When Alex encounters him years later, Luke has embraced a lonely anonymity. The book ends not with this hopeless finality, though, but with the description of a rapturous, timeless afternoon by the sea enjoyed by the four lovers in their heyday. Thus, by writing the novel that Luke should have written, Alex succeeds, to an extent, in conquering time, in giving himself "the chance to rearrange, alter, change; to make things end differently." Hypnotic and evocative, this complicated novel is a superb re-creation of an idyllic time, the dreamy druggy Eden of golden youth. (May) FYI: Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence is an NBCC nominee in criticism.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

At 26, Luke leaves England for Paris, hell-bent on living the life of a dissolute wannabe writer. He produces precious little writing, preferring to spend his energy on his sexually inventive affair with the lovely Nicole and his friendship with best chum Alex and his lover, Sahra. The foursome vacation together, prowl the Parisian movie houses for must-see films that trigger (for them, anyway) snappy critical analysis. Drug consumption glues the four friends together until Luke's selfishness inevitably unravels their ties. A frustrating effort by a clearly talented writer (nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award for Out of Sheer Rage: Wresling with D.H. Lawrence) whose flashes of brilliance are more tease than enticement. Attempts to be clever by shifting narrator Alex's story back and forth from first to third person fall short. Ironically, the author warns his readers on the very first page that this is going to be a slog. "The events recorded here concerned only a handful of people and, quite probably, are of interest only to those people." Exactly. Not recommended.--Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

English music- and literary-critic Dyer (Out of Sheer Rage, 1998, etc.) offers his first novel—a disappointing improvisation on the Parisian themes of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Not so many years ago, at the age of 26, Luke Barnes moved from London to Paris to write "a book based on his experiences of living." In Paris, Luke goes to a lot of movies (especially action thrillers and POW films) and eventually finds work at the Garnier Warehouse, where he meets narrator Alex (also English). Luke and Alex become great friends right away and are soon spending all their free time together. Eventually, Luke falls in love with Nicole, who's from Belgrade—they meet on the street—and the two move in together. Not long thereafter, Alex begins dating Sahra, an American interpreter of Libyan descent, and the four of them become constant companions, taking Christmas and summer vacations together and hanging out over the course of long evenings of food and conversation ("That's how it was at that time: no evening was complete unless everyone had their say about Cassavetes, his directorial style, his limitations, his influence"). But this isn't exactly Jules and Jim: Despite all his talk of art, Luke writes next to nothing and comes nowhere near completing the novel he had come to Paris to begin. After a time, he leaves Paris (and Nicole) altogether and wanders for some years in America and Mexico. Much later, Alex (by now happily married and a father) sees Luke once more in England, but it can never be the same again: "What good does it do anyone, knowing that they once sat with friends in a car and called out the names of cinemas and films, that they ate lunch in a townwhose name they have forgotten? Pointless to a fault, pock-marked with cliches about expatriates and la vie boheme: a chronicle of squandered youth that would have seemed old-hat 50 years ago.

Kirkus Reviews