Left Bank by Agnès Poirier

There are apparently a lot of historical innacuracies in this book as well as literary ones, but it was an enjoyable read, none-the-less. I Sought it out from an article in The Economist suggesting 7 books to read to better understand modern day France. The subtitle is Art, Passion, and the Rebirth of Paris, 1940-50. The author, a French journalist who, like de Gaulle, lives between London and Paris, walks the reader through the decade in which Paris rose from wartime shame to assert its claims to be world capital of art, philosophy and turtlenecks teems with such vignettes. The book focuses mostly on the authors who lived in Paris through this time period and how their thinking shifted and eventually shaped up. Sartre, De Beauvoir, Camus, Hemingway all get a voice, as do some artists beyond Picasso of course. There is a fair amount of white washing, or ignoring, what was going on across Europe while Paris was occupied, but it does cast a vision of how the experience of occupation might be seen to shape post-war France. The Americans in Paris who prove most sympathetic in Poirier’s story are black. She traces the experiences of three African Americans – Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Miles Davis – each blindsided by finding romance and creative stimulation away from the US. Poirier, though, doesn’t nail why Paris, today hardly a byword for racial harmony, was then so appealingly color blind. This is gone now, but let's not forget it existed. She also doesn't deal head on with de Gaulle, who left, and the Resistance, which stayed. When I think of the courage and heroism of Volodymyr Zelenskyy itr makes me cringe all over for how de Gaulle decamped France, and then refused to admit he left a defeated country. But all this for another time--one of the other books on the list is de Gaulle biography.