Broadway Books 2009. Jacket Design: Elizabeth Rendfleisck, Jacket Photograph: Steven Rothfeld
BOOKS READ 35: THE SWEET LIFE IN PARIS BY DAVID LEBOVITZ
I’m not from where I am living now.
I hail from the equivalent of Texas in Canada. Calgary.
I left Calgary when I was 17 to go to Emily Carr University in Vancouver, BC (where I now am). I knew that I would never be staying in Calgary past high school. I wanted to be in a place where all the bands went to. I wanted to be in a place where you could see and touch the ocean. I wanted to be in a place where it wasn’t so cold all the time. I wanted to be far from Calgary because I didn’t really fit in as much as I knew I could. Looking back on it, I realize I was also incredibly…naive and oblivious to a lot of things that I was able to think, fuck it, and leave and not look back. I can’t do that so easily now. A person told me, that you got to keep moving, otherwise the longer you stay, the harder it will be to leave. All the connections you made, too hard to break. He also said, and he prefaced it with, ‘I think this is kind of nice’ (and I agree with his preface and am thus saying it here), you either move for love or a job.
I’ve always felt the need to keep moving after leaving Calgary. A way to feel like my life was going through significant progressions and phases. I haven’t since yet moved from Vancouver, and to be honest, I don’t know if I will. I have all these places that I’d love to live for a year or so. Go to Mexico and learn how to cook legit Mexican food and convince a cooking school there to let me learn from them and possibly let me teach (haha), and oh yah, learn Spanish. Go to New York to see if I could make it and not cry everyday. Go to Hong Kong and get back to my heritage and connect with family more and be part of a city that is moving so fast and where you feel like anything could happen. And to finally learn Cantonese and not have those dinners with family where I just sit there and smile without anything to say (because usually I have so much I’d like to say). Go to Paris and miraculously learn French even though I use comme si comme sa to describe a whatever situation. Go to LA and see if it’s as awful as everyone says it is, even though for some reason I think it could be really nice.
I don’t know if it’s complacency (most likely) or what, but when I really think about moving, the logistics, what you have to go through, it makes me…ill. It also makes me realize how much I love Vancouver and my life here. It also makes me realize that everything becomes day to day no matter where you are. That is life. And my notions of these places are way too romantic that my expectations would probably never be fulfilled and I’d always feel the need to move, to constantly search for that feeling that I may never be able to find. I also get hesitant because even though the distance between Calgary and Vancouver is relatively small, I feel like I am split into two. Calgary self and Vancouver self. And at times that is nice. I can go back and forth when I need to. But I also have this slight feeling of displacement of never being in sync with the place when I quite want to be. You realize that everything moves on without you and you feel the need to catch up, but you can’t because you just weren’t there.
Enough of that.
The book.
This book is about a man going to Paris to live after his partner died to feel something (I started choking up so hard when I read this one sentence in the book, it’s always so devastating to me to read about someone losing someone they love). The book…is okay. It reads more like a blog (the author is a famous blogger), there are no long story arcs (except for of course, what it is like to live in Paris, but bleh, that doesn’t count cause it’s a given). It’s more just quick anecdotal bits about Parisian life with a recipe at the end of each anecdote (like…a food blog). The author’s love for Paris is genuine and evident and he is probably joking really hard in order to make a point, but he makes Parisians seem like the most superficial, annoying, non-sensical people on earth. But all said, it still made me long for Paris even more.
I’ll be seeing it this summer.
And I am looking forward to it. Flaws and all.
