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Paris to the Moon: A Family in France | 
| Author: Adam Gopnik
Publisher: Quercus
Category: Book
Buy Used: $8.99
Used (6) from $8.99
Avg. Customer Rating:  143 reviews
Sales Rank: 3337305
Format: Import
Media: Paperback
Pages: 352
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5 x 1
ISBN: 1847243924
EAN: 9781847243928
ASIN: 1847243924
Publication Date: January 10, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Condition: Different cover
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| Customer Reviews: Read 138 more reviews...
 Sip it like champagne. September 1, 2008
I sipped this book much like one sips a glass of champagne. I began reading it the last week of May, and it took me until early this morning to complete it. Allow me to explain.
Gopnik is a columnist for The New Yorker, which means that his style can be...well, a bit thick. His prose is often syrupy like pouring thick molasses from a jar. It's best enjoyed in small bites. I would often read only a chapter at a time to digest what I'd read: in-depth descriptions of French bureaucracy, a sit-in at the brasserie Balzar, and other complicated scenarios that required contemplation. Another problem, if you can deign to call it such, is that Gopnik failed to define certain French terms to the reader who might not be familiar with the French language.
Perhaps the most enjoyable portions of the book are when Gopnik writes about his family, in particular his son Luke. Luke is an interesting character because he isn't quite American but neither is he quite French. He's held in limbo because of his expat parents. Curiously, Luke seemed to me more adult than child at times. In particular, his expressions are uniquely European. For instance, when he has a crush on a fellow schoolgirl, he says, "She's quite a dish!" What a way to describe someone, especially coming from a child of four or five!
Gopnik really doesn't write much about his wife, Martha. We know that she played a large part in the decision to move from New York City to Paris, but she actually plays a minor role in his book and is mentioned surprisingly infrequently.
Overall, it was an interesting piece about French culture if a bit difficult to read at times. I do think it would have been easier to read if I was a regular reader of his column at the time the family resided in Paris. And perhaps the average reader couldn't relate to just moving to Paris in a whim. But because I moved to a city on just such a whim, I felt a kinship with Gopnik and his family. It is his appreciation and attempts to understand the culture he suddenly became immersed in that caused me to continue to turn the pages.
 Yes if you're a francophile, no if you like good literature June 19, 2008
This is a book for francophiles. It might be a good resource on French culture and attitudes if you will be spending an extended time traveling or working in France. But if you are looking for good literature, skip it.
Should have known by just opening the cover - the first SENTENCE in the book has 9 (count 'em - NINE) commas in it. The prose is self-centered, self-conscious, and self-congratulatory.
You are regaled by sentences like this one: "The lucidity of Parisian empiricism was bought at the price of the grandiosity of Parisian abstraction, and you couldn't have one without the other".
Gopnik is the sort of author who thinks when he breaks a fingernail, it's significant and we need to know. You get an entire chapter devoted to a bedtime story he made up for his son, end to end.
The author needs to get over himself, and the editor needs to go back to flipping burgers. Spend your valuable leisure hours reading something else!
 Precision or the Sanctity of Superfluous Civilization June 16, 2008
PARIS TO THE MOON is a collection of essays by a NEW YORKER writer. Gopnik and his wife moved to Paris in 1995. When a young teen, he visited Paris in 1773. After the couple's child was born in 1994 they endeavored to fulfill Adam's desire to live in Paris while their son was still portable. The romance of Paris became the author's subject for his NEW YORKER pieces. There was no big story in France. There was a lot of peace amd prosperity in the world and a lot animosity directed toward the United States. When Adam Gopnik thinks of Paris he thinks of his wife Martha and his son Luke.
French politicians engage in ostentatious displays of detachment. The Parisian government has a clutch of domaine prive apartments. In reality, most apartments in Paris are not available to rent in a market sense. It seems that one of the politicians lodged his entire family in various domaine prive apartments. French life in general is chock full of entitlements. North African immigrants, though, have no entree. The French elites have now decided that the cure for hidden deals is transparency. Gopnik describes a strike. France is a centralized country and anything that mainly affects Paris is a national event. French people deal with an event by pretending it isn't happening. (Picasso and Sartre pretended the Germans didn't occupy Paris.)
The writer's son Luke enjoys the Luxembourg Gardens, even in November. Trying to join an American-style gym, the author discovers that the rhetoric, the cult of sport is absent in France. Talking about the bureaucracy takes the place of talking about sport. In France there is no retirement anxiety. People don't link the notion of stopping to work with stopping to live as people do in the U.S. It is believed that what France needs is its own Bill Gates. It has a philosopher, Habermas, who contends that the basis for the state is the human love of arguing.
The French have been obsessed with Vichy for more than twenty-five years. Thus, they did not finally confront their past during Papon's trial in Bordeaux. Explanation turns first on romanticism, next on ideological rigor, and finally on the futility of explanation. In 1997 there was an incident at the Eiffel Tower. The French draw their identity from their jobs, the Americans from what they buy. Adam Gobnik decides that couture is romantic cartoon. Yves St. Laurent is still the favorite in 1997 of the Socialists in the government. He uses opera arias to show his clothes. The new Bibliotheque Nationale, a Mitterand grand project, is, according to Gopnik, in the totalitarian Luxe style. Other transformations of cultural sites have been undertaken at the Louvre and the Bastille Opera. Jazz, loved by the French, and Impressionism, loved by the Americans, confirm the simple physical basis of powerful emotion.
Alice Waters is in Paris at some point during the writer's stay. He offers to cook dinner for her and is nervous. Her ends up cooking lamb for seven hours where four would have been appropriate. It seems that the purpose of the visit of Alice Waters to Paris is to determine the feasibility of opening a restaurant at the Musee des Arts Decoratifs at the Louvre. She has reconciled utopian politics with aristocratic cooking. The crucial unit of French social life is the cohort. Members of the cohort inhabit neutral places such as parks and cafes.
The couple's daughter Olivia is born in Paris. Since Paris is beautiful, but France is not a life, the family returns to America. The book is both amusing and instructive.
 a worthwhile read for lovers of Paris April 30, 2008
An interesting collection of essays about family life in Paris. Gopnik's erudite, interesting descriptions of the City of Light will delight Francophiles, although his writing is fairly pretentious and pedantic at times. Nevertheless, this book is still a worthwhile read.
Living the Spoiled Life in Paris February 10, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I picked up this book for insights on the less-touristy aspects of Paris, prior to a trip my family is taking. It's a very enjoyable book, and the author's descriptions definitely have raised my anticipation level for our visit, as well as given me ideas about places for kids. Plus (as many other reviewers noted), it's a funny and charming book. As the husband of a former chef, I enjoyed his discursions about cooking, too.
My one complaint comes from the occasional pretentiousness and preciousness of the author's lifestyle. How many of us could move to Paris for five years during the prime of our working lives? And how many of us could take a month's vacation to the US in the summer, or fly our kids back for two days of interviews for kindergarten? Kindergarten?
The author comes from a very small slice of our society, and he both downplays this and celebrates it at different times. And I don't like it. For example, his literary allusions -- whether French, English or American -- go over my head. I'm a well-read person, but I feel as if the author is trying to show that he has a greater range than his readers. To shift from Baudelaire to the New York Knicks within a few paragraphs is trying to have it both ways -- the intellectual and the common man.
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