The Paris Notebooks

"We'll always have Paris."

"...as long as you have a notebook with the word Paris in it, right?"

Quentin S Crisp, whose novel Hamster Dam is discussed in a previous post here, says he wrote the notebooks in Paris in 2007, then revisited them and arranged them for publication as The Paris Notebooks. 

 

I mean, I say "he says"... reading Crisp's writing seems intended to stimulate uncertainty. Considering the extents to which the narrator ("I") and the French hostess ("S") are fictive, projections, elaborations, is perhaps the point, if point there has to be. 

 

All the events recorded in the notebooks are inconsequential, passing situations, the sorts of observations of nothings that might emerge uncertainly from the pen of any queasy undergraduate scratching their pimples over un café and a brand new Moleskine in the Deuxieme Arrondissement. They are also entirely consequential, enduring, something.

 

C'est la façon de la dire. Crisp creates an unsettling, uncertain, distance between work and worker, fabric and fabricator, tissue and liar weeping over their disingenuity. This is what I like about his writing.