During a time when I was drinking gallons of water everyday and fantasizing about water when I was not drinking it, I happened on a magazine article about designer waters and dedicated water bars and water pairings at restaurants. The article also mentioned this book, Jaune bleu blanc, saying it contained an episode where a group of young Parisians drink a bottle of water in each of the cafés on a certain street in Paris. Now that is just my kind of activity and just my kind of thing to read about. I love to read about people doing nothing, or at least as close to nothing as possible, so I went on a little hunt and eventually ordered the book from France, which felt like a luxury almost as good as drinking $5 glasses of water.
I imagined the book being a more soignée The Sun Also Rises, with sketching instead of bullfights and water instead of absinthe, but it turns out not to be a novel at all. It is a collection of essays, mostly about travel, most of them in the form of letters to friends, and it is very charming, but the café-hopping aquamaniacs are nowhere to be found. There is only a ghost of the them in the first essay, Paris de France, which is all about what is to be from Paris, or to claim to be from Paris, and to leave Paris and then return to it. He is writing about how he and a friend one August decided to treat the Champs-Elysée as a resort spa. They would arrive early every morning, take a 1/4 liter of Evian at 8 o'clock, breakfast at 9, go for a walk, read, and spend the afternoon exploring and enjoying everything that little corner of Paris had to offer. I'm consoled by that. I'd like to do that in my own town--or any town, really, just so long as I was allowed to spend hours and hours slowly wandering and getting a feel for it and hours and hours more sitting down with books and nice things to drink.
I mostly read this book on the train going to and from work, and because it was in French and I didn't know what all the words meant, I had a nice feeling of being lost. Larbaud is a good person to be lost with. He is modern and chatty and a little frivolous sometimes. One essay is all about girls' first names and which ones are the prettiest. Another long essay is about how exhausting it is to travel. He is also head-to-toe a literary man, and he's reverential toward his heroes, Leopardi, Walter Savage Landor, and Samuel Butler, and goes to visit places associated with them. Somehow in describing these writers' landscapes or travels, he made me want to read their books. But this man Larbaud made me want a lot of things. My favorite essay was about Portugal, where he goes alone, not speaking the language, and reads a book in Portuguese and goes to the zoo to see the hippopotamus and walks around on the streets and goes to the movies. Even before I had finished that essay I had started telling everybody I know that I wanted to move to Portugal.
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