‘Château Rouge’: Amit Chaudhuri shows a new Paris through the poetics and politics of its streets
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La vie est autre que ce qu’on écrit.
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A prime luxury of being a reader – a good reader of a good writer – is that you willingly find your imagination moving in the way the writer means it to. So it is that I have travelled around the world in pages.
Because of this, or in spite of it, a water-coloured image of Paris has been afforded to me in the past, primarily through its warren of streets. The exaggerated exuberance of the Eiffel Tower, with its excessive proliferation across social media, holds less promise than the streets of Paris. The streets – that is where the action happens. It is the Parisian streets that we amble along in the company of Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, Honoré de Balzac, André Breton.
André Breton. It is he who, in his Les Pas perdus (The Lost Steps, translated by Mark Polizzotti), inspires curiosity. “…[T]he street, with its cares and its glances, was my true element. There I could test, like nowhere else, the winds of possibility.”
Walking in the streets means the promise of chance encounters in the tedious routine of life, to find oneself by un-finding oneself. And it is the sum of these accidental and incidental encounters that sculpt...