Product Description

An NYRB Classics Original

Jean-Paul Clbert was a boy from a respectable middle-class family who ran away from school, joined the French Resistance, and never looked back. Making his way to Paris at the end of World War II, Clbert took to living on the streets, and in , a so-called aleatory novel assembled out of sketches he jotted down at the time, he tells what it was like. His gallery of faces and cityscapes on the road to extinction is an astonishing depiction of a world aparta Paris, long since vanished, of the poor, the criminal, and the outcastand a no less astonishing feat of literary improvisation: Its long looping breathless sentences, streetwise, profane, lyrical, incantatory, are an adventure in their own right. Praised on publication by the great novelist and poet Blaise Cendrars and embraced by the young Situationists as a kind of manual for living off the grid, here published with the starkly striking photographs of Clberts friend Patrice Molinardis a raw and celebratory evocation of the life of a city and the underside of life.