The Best Kept Secret in London
The door of the universal stick man was locked. I banged on it but to no avail. I banged again, almost beside myself, and this time heard a noise. The person inside was finishing up. The door opened and out came… something. He (the personal pronoun is appropriate since he had, after all, elected to visit the Gentlemen’s) seemed to be half-man and half-gorilla. Past me he shuffled, bent low with a face the colour of midnight and a throat pleated like a turkey’s. He wore a plum-coloured jacket and kept his eyes, which I did not have the opportunity to see, firmly on the ground.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ve left rather a mess.’
By James Clammer.
Intimate City: Jean Follain’s Paris 1935 and the Parisian Diorama
There is a pervading sensuality to Follain’s Paris. It is not steeped in sex in the way of J-K Huysmans’ Parisian Sketches, with its vivid and overly familiar descriptions of the Folies Bergère, dressmaker’s busts, and surprisingly, roast meat. If Paris 1935 lusts, it is with an elegance that stands in intimate juxtaposition to the most unlikely events: ‘We were eating when the riot broke out and we let the melting pear juice trickle down our throats’. There is violence and appetite, and neither are far from each other in the way death shadows life. The desire which emerges from these contrasts is all the more powerful for it, such as in the memories of dead lovers in the minds of old men.
Tomoé Hill reviews Paris 1935 by Jean Follain.