I bought this book for a dollar at a used bookstore up north based soley on the charming title. Charming to me because a Parisian is what every intellI bought this book for a dollar at a used bookstore up north based soley on the charming title. Charming to me because a Parisian is what every intellectual, culture seeking, literature loving American would like to be and dreams of being. I wanted to be a "parisian from california" which is oddly enough what our author or biographer gets called in the reviews towards the end. When I first picked up the book and skimmed the first few pages I was also charmed by what was inside. I immediately loved the impressionistic way he was describing paris but I was a bit surprise when I found out that the main character Darren was dying of AIDS. This was a heavy subject. Someone dying of AIDS set against the backdrop of dreamy paris. One of the first things Darren says in the book is about how getting AIDS makes one mystical. Mystical Darren is an essential part of the book. There is alot about Darren's spiritual and mystical progress throughout the book. He goes to parisian fortune tellers and believes that his early death is destined and has always been. Destiny, death, and desire, the three D's play a big part in this book. Darren overcomes what he believes was the accident of his birth place (being born on a farm in Kansas to a hick family) he is a self-made man. He leaves this place, dreams of bigger and better things, has always had a sense of his own destiny but also a sense of his own purity which sets him apart from the rest of his family. This is how by the force of his own will and imagination he becomes a Parisian from Kansas. That is very inspiring to american dreamers growing up in rural places and wanting more, wanting culture. But Darren is also the kind of person whose pinnacle of existence is finding the perfect Cafe, the Cafe Marly. A cafe he loves more than anything. Now that I have talked about Darren I want to talk a little about Phillipe, his "biographer". Darren commissions Phillipe to write his life story before he dies so that his life will be immortalized in this work. It is part of Darrens egotistical and narcissistic side to want this. The book is written entirely from Phillipes perspective. It is what he calls a Self-referent novel. And it is really a book thats about writing a book. It is about the limits of compassion, the writers struggle, dying, mysticism, ex-patriots, being gay in the 80's, Paris. I have never read a book quite like it. It was one of the best things I read all year. Best dollar I spent....more
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