A Corner in the Marais: Memoir of a Paris Neighborhood

I loved this book, especially as I was staying a few doors down from his apartment in a hotel and it made my visit enhanced by his descriptions and thoughts.

This is a great book to read while in Paris. With the book in hand, we easily found many points mentioned in it (and it answered some questions we had had while walking around the Marais on our own). It's very much a "labor of love" by someone who became intrigued by a small slice of history that, coincidentally, sheds some light on the broader picture over a long period. Anyone who enjoys history will envy the author's dig through old documents and records searching for even tangential mentions of his building, and the people associated with it. (Also recommended, for entirely other reasons: "Paris to the Moon," by Adam Gopnik.)

This book reminded me of William Murray's City of Soul, about Rome. Karmel is obviously in love with his Paris and it is infectious. The narrative about Karmel's first trip to Paris, then how he moved to Paris and bought an apartment in the Marais was intriguing, although his detours into the history of the neighborhood were less interesting. I found I wanted to know more about Karmel and his wife than about who had lived in his street two hundred years ago.And the photographs! There are some marvelous black and white Atget photos in this book and although there really isn't much going on in them, these studies of shadow and light are worth the price of the book alone.

I read this book on the train coming home from Paris and could picture the building, the neighborhood and really got a feeling for the area. I only wish the book had been longer and had delved into the author's personal life in Paris a bit more. Maybe in Volume Two, one can hope.

A Corner in the Marais is one of those books you don't need to read, but having read it, you feel better about life. It's a book to be treasured and passed along to family and friends. It traces the architectural and social history of one of Paris's most interesting neighborhoods. It reads like a novel because you also learn how the neighborhood touches the life of the author. In an over-commercialized world where evidence of a publisher's passion for quality is often absent, A Corner in the Marais stands for quality writing, quality layout, quality typography and quality paper and printing. A wonderful read.