dev & bets.

Everything ends, I thought.
Everything except Paris, I say now. Everything ends except Paris, for there is never any end to Paris, it is always with me, it's a feast that follows me. There can be an end to this summer, it will end. The world can go to ruin, it will be ruined. But to my youth, to Paris, there is never any end.

 ~ Enrique Vila- Matas, Never Any End to Paris 

I started this novel this evening. I thought, perhaps, that I could read it prior to A Moveable Feast, but the narrative is so contingent on Hemingway's posthumous publication that I now realize it impossible. As books often are when you need them most, A Moveable Feast was borrowed from the library. Ten pages in and this book is already incredible, but I know it will be better in context, so I am willing to wait. 

For me, Paris is a dream. It exists, immortalized in my mind, as images of the 1920s. The era of the Lost Generation; of Stein's salons and Sylvia's bookshop. Of Hemingway and Joyce and Fitzgerald. I know this is not Paris, at least not any more, but it is so easy to romanticize a place you've never been that I find it hard to think otherwise. 

Will this Paris end for me when, one day, I finally see France for myself? Will I build for myself a new vision of Paris, combining the past with what I've seen? I'm curious, because I really have no answer. 

Vila-Matas writes of a stubborn man who believes himself the spitting image of Hemingway, his idol and who, as it turns out was disqualified from a Hemingway look alike contest due to an "absolute lack of physical resemblance". He tells of his time in Paris, two years in his youth, during which attempted to relive the Left Bank life of the 1920s. I know I would be prone to this nostalgic brand of tourism. But tourism and nostalgia are old friends, for what is the appeal of visiting a historic site or location of where a building once stood, where people once lived, if not to imagine you'd been there yourself? To imagine what has ended? To relive what has gone to ruin? I'd propose historical tourism as an exercise in imagination, but that would call for a much longer piece of writing. 

So back to Vila-Matas, that fine Spanish novelist. I don't know much else about the story yet, except that I assume it will eventually end, like this post is about to and like Paris never does. Putting the book down was a challenge. I can't wait to start Hemingway, then come back to this one. 

Dev.