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Jean-Paul Clebert (1926-2011) joined the French Resistance in 1943 when he was sixteen. After the war, he traveled in Asia and worked as a house painter, cook, newspaper seller, farm worker, and cafe proprietor before returning to Paris and living as a vagrant for three or four years, an experience that influenced his 1952 work Unknown Paris. Clebert went on to write 32 books, including volumes on the history of southern France, where he moved in 1956. Donald Nicholson-Smith's translations of noir fiction include Manchette's Three to Kill; Thierry Jonquet's Mygale (a.k.a. Tarantula); and (with Alyson Waters) Yasmina Khadra's Cousin K. He has also translated works by Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Henri Lefebvre, Raoul Vaneigem, Antonin Artaud, Jean Laplanche, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Guy Debord. For NYRB Classics he has translated Manchette's Fatale and The Mad and the Bad, published in the US, and is presently working on Jean-Paul Clebert's Paris Insolite. Nicholson-Smith won the 28th Annual Translation Prize of the French-American Foundation and Florence Gould Foundation for fiction for his translation of Jean-Patrick Manchette's The Mad and the Bad. Born in Manchester, England, he is a longtime resident of New York City. Patrice Molinard (1922-2002) began his career taking stills for Georges Franju's legendary documentary on the Paris slaughterhouse at La Villette, Le Sang des Betes (1949). As a film director, he is best known for Fantasmagorie (1963), Orphee 70 (1968), and Bistrots de Paris (1977).
A rollicking, poetically charged tale of privation and adventure, a first cousin of Kerouac s On the Road for all that it takes place within the confines of one city. Clebert finds all the hidden worlds the shacks and Gypsy wagons on the periphery, the ostensibly vacant lots . . . the mushroom farms and serpentariums concealed inside apartments. . . . Luc Sante A remarkably vivid, detailed book that seems to have been composed with no method, its narrative marked by a chaotic and cheerfully self-acknowledged spontaneity Clebert is a master of the long, cascading list-sentence, trippingly rendered into English by Donald Nicholson-Smith. His descriptions are mirrored by (not illustrated by) the bleak photographs of Patrice Molinard A connoisseur of chaos, Clebert is the poet of the lumpen-proletariat and of a forgotten city. Edmund White, The New York Times Book Review 'This is not supposed to be a Baedeker or some tourist guide: ' Clebert offers a hellish itinerary of the less fortunate quarters of Paris. First published in 1952, Clebert s Paris insolite has been classified as a novel, though it is as journalistic as George Orwell s Down and Out in Paris and London ; if it has novelistic kinship, it might be to Jean Genet s Thief s Journal ..The photographs, by Molinard, are in the stark documentary style of a Weegee or Robert Frank . Altogether, they add to the impression that this is less a novel than a book of reportage. But no matter how it's classified, it's a sobering, eyes-wide-open view of the Paris no guidebook would care to portray. Kirkus Reviews Paris Vagabond is a pleasure to tag along with, from sentence to sentence, section to section, arrondissement to arrondissement. Its catalogs of wonders are as strange to my eyes as the catalogs of Herodotus or Italo Calvino...Paris Vagabond should be required reading for all Francophiles of the Eiffel Tower, Paris to the Moon variety...In brief, Nicholson-Smith has done a seamless job of reassembling Paris Insolite in English...It s hard to think of another book about Paris that is so entertaining, so brutal, or so genuine. Alex Andriesse, Reading in Translation Poetry in the rough...Clebert s acute insider s view of the erstwhile clandestine 'Zone' of Paris and other rundown quarters in 1944-1948, and the striking photographs by Patrice Molinard (1922-2002) that accompany the text, make an extraordinary book that should be in the hands of every lover of the French capital...a French classic long overdue in English, which has been given a vivid rendering by Donald Nicholson-Smith. John Taylor, The Arts Fuse Readers who come to the printed page in search of life atrocious, beautiful, sordid, picturesque, funny and tragic life, of the warming sun and freezing rains, with behind it all a muscular and heartfelt sensuality these readers will not be disappointed. Henry Muller, Carrefour The most startling, the most lively, the most Mysteries of Paris work to appear since the peregrinations of Gerard de Nerval. Rene Fallet, Le Canard Enchaine Praise for The Blockhouse Clebert s prose...hits an unfailing stride in the febrile Poe-esque evocation of the horror climax...Clebert displays a very impressive and extremely painful talent for the inferno of [his characters ] minds. Frederic Morton, The New York Times
