Paris Trance: A Romance

I thought this book was terrific. I'm not a big fan of romantic novels, but this one got me going for a week or so. It has a plot that for some may not make too much sense, the writing itself is very straight forward and quite real...you can almost feel those characters to be a part of you. What I loved most about this book is the language the author uses, his examples....how he describes the scenes of love, sex...it's very raw, ugly in a way, but real and beautiful at the same time. If you want to read a story about how people in Europe feel about sex, love, relationships, the importance of work...happiness you can read this book, because it will give you a very close point of view... Definitely recommended, very different from what so called "New York Bestsellers" are trying to sell you...enjoy it and I hope you do as much as I did. I spent every free moment I had to read this book.

I read this book not expecting much. It seemed to be an example of someone trying to recreate the books of the lost generation in post-modern dress. I thought it would fail to be something new. I was astounded at how wrong I was. This book has some major faults but they are sandwhiched between large segments of the novel that are amazingly brilliant. This is, perhaps, the best look at the feelings of early love Ive ever read. The book is a deep look at beauty and happiness, asnd the degree to which moments of happiness survive the passage of time. Dyer brilliantly uses a second person narrator who admitedly tells the reader mental thoughts of the characters that he could not know. He has decided that since the main character will not tell his story, he must do it for him and he must fill in the holes. He does so in brilliant fashion. He captures what it is like to be twentysomething and in love, he captures what it is like to be in love in Paris, and he manages to capture the spirit of lawrence, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Dos Passos WITHOUT it feeling like a retelling of modernism. The book is definitively post-modern both in style and message, but still manages to update the tropes founded by The Sun Also Rises. A must read for any fan of post-modernism OR the lost generation. Dyer may well be Britain's most promising young writer. This is a life-affirming novel.

Luke moves to Paris and, with his new love and another expatriate couple from whom they become inseparable, wanders the Eleventh Arrondissement, where clubs, cafes, banter, and drugs occupy the "City of Lights". In Paris Trance, novelist Geoff Dyer writes of Luke's dream of happiness (and its aftermath) with a definitive and authentic intensity. This is a work of eroticism, romance, youth, humor, and originality that can be highly recommended to anyone who has a taste for the expatriate novels of the pre-war 1920s and 30s, and post-war 1950s and 60s eras.

Geoff Dyer's other books are mostly unclassifiable meditations on jazz (But Beautiful), the fascination of war (The Missing of the Somme) and the fear of failure (Out of Sheer Rage). His infrequent novels are pretty good, though. Paris Trance is about falling in love - I actually typed "failling" by mistake, but it was serendipity, because it's also about failing in love. Luke, the hero, is admired by the narrator Alex in much the same way that Fitzgerald's Gatsby is admired by Nick Carraway. (Hmmm, my name is Alex and my brother's name is Nick. Odd that.) What Luke is after, or thinks he's after, is a dream of perfection, and it's only when he achieves it that he lets it go. Drift is the order of Luke's universe. There's a terribly sad episode about half way through when Alex pays Luke a visit in the present (most of the book is a vast, quasi-nostalgic flashback) and speculates to himself about the loneliness of Luke's life; lines from that part have followed me around for months. Some of the dialogue is uncomfortably Hip; there's some rather too-easy pop-culture riffing, inspired according to Dyer by his admiration for Don DeLillo's way with dialogue. But the book has the same sort of deeper ambiguities as "Gatsby"; Alex writes the book as part of a struggle with himself between his creeping discomfort with his own ordinariness and Luke's tragic appetite for living such grand abstractions as Destiny and Bliss. The sheen of the prose, when describing events like the characters walking through a French field high on acid, has the poignant lustre of remembered happiness. (Dyer's first novel was called The Colour of Memory and is, I think, quite a bit better than this one.) I don't know if Dyer is a natural novelist and he isn't too sure himself. But Paris Trance is a beautiful book, if it isn't this writer at his best. And it has some wonderful bits: a spoof re-enactment of "Brief Encounter", brilliant accounts of what it's like to go to a pub in a foreign city and a couple of great sex scenes. His non-fiction is maybe more intellectually electric but his fiction is a quieter pleasure. Five stars, not because I think the book is a flat-out masterpiece but because he's a fantastic writer and I wanted to bring the average up.

A beautifully written book...! Its minimalist postmodern style exudes poetry. This is a book about the flame of youth and the ashes it turns into when one can't let go of it. Though this book can instantly pull the reader into the freshness and bohemian charm of youth, fibers of melancholy and despair run through it. Paris Trance is a tale of youth, friendship and love which captures well the existential struggle of generation X.