The narrator of Deborah Levy’s witty scherzo of a “fiction” – “novel” isn’t the word for this uncategorisable book – thinks that Gertrude Stein would have liked Sigmund Freud. She imagines them enjoying a cigar together while their wives make small talk. Would Frau Freud “have exchanged her recipe for boiled beef with Alice B [Toklas]’s recipe for hashish fudge”? The two never met (though with her interest in the “bottom character” and his in the “unconscious”, Stein and Freud would have had plenty to talk about), but that barely matters. This book is full of things that don’t actually happen, of relationships that are not what the people involved suppose them to be, of digressions and fantasies and encounters that are imagined but never take place.

It all starts with a lost cat. The cat is called “it”: lower-case “i” followed by lower-case “t”. This causes all sorts of linguistic confusion, highlighting the way we use the word “it” to mean something indeterminate (as in the first sentence of this paragraph), or something trivial, or something tremendous. The phrase “lost it” recurs, the “it” meaning – variously – one’s mind, sympathy with Ernest Hemingway, daring to be as unconventional as Gertrude Stein, the stream of consciousness “flowing under the mowed and manicured golf courses on which men swung their clubs in the 21st century”, the temptation to smile while being undermined by a patronising man, the drudgery of housekeeping, the thing – which might be obedience or shame – that holds an artist back from becoming a modernist … or love, or one’s mother, or a black-and-white cat with one deformed ear.

The book doesn’t exactly have a plot, but there is a situation. Three female friends are in Paris. The narrator (English, single) is writing, or failing to write, an essay about Gertrude Stein. Eva (Spanish-Danish, married to a man in Seattle whom she sees once a week, if that, on FaceTime) is a graphic novelist. Fanny (French, polyamorous with three female lovers) is a financier.

Fanny is impatient, annoyingly often on her phone at mealtimes and capable of spite. Sexy and chic, she thinks Stein’s “knitted woollen stocking would have been erotically catastrophic” and says her “repetition drives me in-saane”. But she is also secretly vulnerable, wounded by her father’s homophobic rejection and more invested in the three-way friendship than either of the others. When the narrator is knocked off her bicycle, it is Fanny who comes to help, having first queued for eight minutes to buy a rum baba bouchon with a slice of roasted pineapple on top. It’s for the narrator – a kind thought – but Fanny explains to her that “if I was dead by the time she reached [me] she would eat it herself”.

Eva looks angelic, and the fuss about her lost cat makes her seem childish, but it gradually dawns on the narrator, and on us, that she is actually commercially astute and emotionally cool. Her all-white apartment is exquisite and so is the fat-free food she serves. She appoints herself the narrator’s assistant, says she will illustrate the Stein essay, and finally announces, without any consultation, that she will take over the project and write it herself. The reason her husband isn’t there is that he is building her a house. Whatever “it” is for her, Eva knows how to get it.

Suspended between these two new friends, the narrator, older and lonelier, moons around Père Lachaise cemetery and frets that however much she finds out about Stein’s life, she can’t get to the “it” of it. Late in the book a kind of romance starts up. Hunting for the lost cat, the three women come across an eligible man of the narrator’s age. He leads them for a moment into a Buñuelesque mystery. He also has a cat with a deformed ear. What’s going on here? He takes the narrator out to dinner, but this courtship is something else that fails to happen – all he wants from her is Eva’s phone number.

Despite the title, the action of the framing story takes place over one month, November 2024, the last month the three friends will be together in Paris, and the month of Donald Trump’s re-election. The narrator watches wars on her phone, the violence interrupted onscreen by adverts for vitamins or life insurance, and IRL by the bells of Notre-Dame.

Most of the time, though, her mind is in Stein’s lifetime, and she carries us there with her. Levy is not competing with Stein’s many biographers. She is writing a meditation, not a chronicle or an explanation. The narrator thinks that, for all her insistence on confining herself to simple words, Stein didn’t “believe in” being understood. “When I look at photographs,” she writes, “I cannot get into her eyes.”

Levy can, though, carry us into the Paris of Stein’s era and introduce us around. She chooses her quotes astutely. Seven lines from On the Road tell us all we need to know about Jack Kerouac’s vanity. A put-down from Virginia Woolf nicely punctures Walt Whitman’s self-righteousness. She has a great knack for summing up a character with one detail. Of the artist Chaïm Soutine: “a doctor had to remove a nest of bedbugs from his ear”. Of Marie Vassilieff, another artist: “When Modigliani arrived, drunk, looking for a fight, she lifted her arms and pushed him down the stairs. Then she carved the chicken.” Of Stein: “she was so forward‑looking that she never learned to reverse her Ford Model T”.

We are not to assume that the narrator is Levy – this is “a fiction”, after all – but of one thing we can be certain. Eva may announce that the essay on Stein will never get written, but here it is – odd, inventive and wonderfully entertaining – triumphantly proving her wrong.

Amazon has withdrawn from the Paris book festival after a boycott by France’s booksellers’ association prompted a row over the company’s sponsorship of the event.

The festival, due to take place from 17 to 19 April, will now go ahead without the backing of the US retail company, after a mutual decision by organisers and Amazon to end their partnership.

The dispute started after the French booksellers’ association Syndicat de la Librairie Française (SLF) announced it would boycott the festival in protest at Amazon’s involvement.

The SLF has been sharply critical of Amazon, arguing that it destabilises the book trade. In a statement reported by the Bookseller, it accused the company of seeking “to flood the market with fake AI-generated books, [which are] promoted by fake reviews, written by fake readers [and rise] to the top of fake rankings”. It also criticised the publishers’ association and the festival organisers for what it described as an “irresponsible” decision to collaborate with Amazon, taken in the name of short-term financial interests.

“We are deeply disappointed by this partisan manoeuvre by the SLF,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement. “Building on ungrounded and misleading claims, [it] hijacks the event for its own benefit and diverts it from its legitimate ambition – namely the celebration of reading, readers and authors.” Amazon said it had decided to withdraw in order to “avoid contributing to this absurd controversy”.

The organisers of the event, Paris Livres Événements, a subsidiary of France’s publishers’ association, said the collaboration had been brought to an end due to “hostility to Amazon’s presence as a sponsor”. They explained that the move was designed to avert “serious disruption” and safeguard the interests of the 450 exhibitors and estimated 120,000 visitors.

They added that their aim was to “ease tensions” and allow the festival to be held in a “peaceful atmosphere”. “No one would benefit from jeopardising it,” the organisers said.

The festival is expected to proceed as planned in April without the retailer’s presence.

In “Elise and the New Partisans,” a graphic novel set to be published in English for the first time this month, Jacques Tardi’s cartoonlike characters—depicted in realistic, harshly lit, black-and-white Parisian street settings—come to life as he draws on memories of the early activism of his longtime partner, the French singer Dominique Grange. The book follows a character named Elise, a stand-in for Grange, during her political awakening in a high-school philosophy class and her subsequent involvement in the civil unrest of the nineteen-sixties, before and after the protests that took place across France in May of 1968. Elise’s story feels relevant and timely—a gesture toward the resurgence of unionization efforts taking place today.

Tardi has been a star in France for decades; his style is so recognizable that he’s typically known by only his last name. Throughout the graphic novel, Tardi weaves political events—the French government’s brutal response to the war of liberation in Algeria, the student and worker uprisings—in with reflections on Grange’s youth. Elise is center stage as she evolves from an earnest student to a hopeful pop musician, then abandons her budding career and becomes a factory worker and an activist. The result is a multifaceted portrait of a person, and of an era. In the excerpt below, Elise reminisces about her times during the May, 1968, protests.

—Françoise Mouly and Genevieve Bormes

This is drawn from “Elise and the New Partisans.”

Eric Hazan, a lifelong Parisian who died in June, wrote several books about his hometown, with a particular focus on the class politics of the built environment. In Balzac’s Paris he revisits the 19th-century social geography of the French capital through the fiction of one of its most famous novelists. Honoré de Balzac’s La Comédie humaine (Human Comedy) – a vast series of novels and stories depicting French society between 1814 and 1848 – is one of the canonical texts of literary realism. In these works, Hazan writes, the street is more than just a setting: “The places where the characters live and evolve are part of their personality; they define them in the same way as their physique, their dress or their psychology.”

First published in France in 2018 and now available in English thanks to David Fernbach’s translation, Balzac’s Paris is a blend of literary criticism and historical psychogeography. Hazan narrates in the manner of a tour guide, hopping from location to location and offering up nuggets of commentary: pertinent quotes from the novels, or Balzac’s personal correspondence; etymological titbits; an apposite line from Baudelaire or Proust. The format, and the languid, dizzyingly directionless prose style, will be familiar to readers of Hazan’s best-known work, The Invention of Paris, a sprawling radical history of the city, which was published in English in 2010.

One moment we’re amid the jumbled streets and medieval architecture of Old Paris, where Balzac’s characters can be found frequenting the gambling dens of the Palais-Royal, or schmoozing at the Opéra. The next we’re being led through New Paris, the area stretching from Montmartre to the city walls, which was built up during a flurry of construction under the July Monarchy (1830-48). Its residents range from the wealthy bankers of the fashionable Chaussée-d’Antin district to the sex workers, known as lorettes, associated with the neighbourhood around the church of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette. (Hazan observes that Balzac portrays them sympathetically, “whereas the noble ladies of high society are either seductive, egotistical, and brutal … or else more or less virtuous dimwits”.)

The less salubrious districts are home to a number of socially marginalised characters. In the Latin Quarter we meet an escaped convict, a mentally fragile marquis down on his luck, and the slimy title character of Gobseck (1830), a moneylender who brags: “I like to leave mud on a rich man’s carpet; it is not petty spite, I like to make them feel a touch of the claws of Necessity.”

For the most part, however, Balzac – a staunch conservative and monarchist – was concerned with depicting the comings and goings of high society. Across the novels, we meet workers “only in passing … because Balzac’s characters, whether bourgeois or aristocratic, have no business in the working-class suburbs”. The political strife of the 1830s rarely featured: “nothing happened – at least nothing in the streets: neither riots nor uprisings, nor insurrections. It is just in the turn of a sentence, in a quick allusion, that we sometimes perceive the distant echo of battles.”

Hazan’s peregrinations culminate in a thoughtful disquisition on literary realism, in which he suggests that the term itself is misleading. He points out that Balzac’s novels make no mention of the railways that were then proliferating in the city, or the new fortifications built in the 1840s; people with chestnut hair – the majority – are conspicuously under-represented in the Human Comedy, as Balzac preferred to populate his stories with characters who have either blond or jet-black hair.

Were this any other writer, the appropriate response would be: so what? He was a novelist, not an archivist. But something about the panoramic breadth and descriptive detail of the Human Comedy, with its cast of about 2,500 characters, has tempted generations of readers and critics to view it as something akin to a factual chronicle. Of course, the novels were only intended as entertainment. “Balzac,” Hazan quips, “is no more of a realist than Scheherazade”. Even so, the mythos of great literature bleeds into our sense of history.

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Amid the sunshine and wild celebrations of Friday 25 August 1944, the day the Germans surrendered control of Paris, Charles de Gaulle declared the city to have been “liberated by itself”, with “the help and assistance of the whole of France”. The truth was not quite so noble. De Gaulle sought to embody “the whole of France”, but it had been a fractured nation, subject to regular violent upheavals, ever since 1789. Its army had crumbled before Hitler in 1940, and the reconstituted French force that triumphantly entered Paris in 1944 comprised one armoured division entirely equipped by, and under the operational command of, the US.

If any one person saved Paris, it was Dwight D Eisenhower, allied commander, who acceded to de Gaulle’s lobbying – Ike being one of the few people who found the prickly General endearing – and agreed to march on the city. The allies’ original intention after the D-day landings had been to bypass Paris, considering it irrelevant to the push towards Germany. Paris was not irrelevant to the world, though. It transcended the unhappy nation to which it belonged, embodying the fantasies, sexual and artistic, of myriad “wannabe Hemingways and Picassos”. This beacon of freedom, the City of Light, had fallen to the powers of darkness, and there was a literal dark cloud over Paris on 10 June 1940, as the Germans approached and the French government departed. The cause was smog from burning fuel dumps, but “the stillness of the night, the sweet scent of chestnut blossom mingled with petrol only increased the sense of impending doom”.

Paris ’44 tells the story of the occupation and the liberation, but it does not read like military history. There’s no danger of being lost in logistics. The book resembles some epic thriller, with vividly evoked characters all somewhere on the spectrum between collaboration and resistance, shame and glory. At the former end we have Marshal Pétain, octogenarian head of the puppet Vichy regime, whose conservative – to put it kindly – values were symbolised by that sedate spa town in which it was based. We learn of Pétain’s daily routines: “Every Sunday morning at 11.15 he went to mass at the church of St Louis, not so much to pray as to set an example.” His henchman, Pierre Laval, wore a white silk tie for luck; it made him resemble “a Chicago mobster, as well as highlighting the nicotine stains on his teeth”.

Also on the roll of dishonour is the military governor of Paris, General Dietrich von Choltitz, described by his captors as “a cinema-type German officer”, by which they meant he was fat, be-monocled and loud. But he wasn’t the most monstrous Nazi. In the summer of 1944, he knew the game was up, and Bishop suggests that he deserves some credit for his relatively restrained response to the Resistance uprising. After the war, he tried to claim the credit for saving Paris from Hitler’s wrath. He had supposedly disregarded an order, sent by telegram from the boss, to incinerate the city (“Is Paris burning?”), but that was probably just another liberation myth.

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Paris did to some extent “liberate itself”, in that the Resistance fighters, emerging from the shadows in 1943, began the job the allies felt compelled to finish. They were extraordinarily brave, usually young and, this being Paris, glamorous. The devoted Gaullist, and tennis champion, Jacques Chaban-Delmas would later be played on film by close lookalike Alain Delon. He retained 30 rooms, all equipped with means of quick exit (service staircases, skylights, etc); his rule on the Métro was “to get into the carriage at the very last minute and dart out again just as the doors slid shut”. And we follow the stirring adventures of Madeleine Riffaud, whose beauty would be captured after the war in a sketch by Picasso, and who joined the Resistance after having her bum kicked by a German officer at Amiens railway station.

Another recurring character is Hemingway, who, as a sort of war tourist-cum-journalist, followed the allies to Paris, liberating much booze on the way. He kept bumping into the “sleek” young GI, Jerry (or JD) Salinger, who advanced with typewriter close at hand and Holden Caulfield evolving in his mind. The two got on well but, as Bishop notes, one idea of masculinity was giving way to another.

That Bishop can break off from war for some literary reflections is testament to his relaxed confidence as a writer, and Paris ’44 is a wonderful book: droll, moving, with a cinematic eye and not a boring line in it.

The Night in Venice by AJ Martin is published on 11 July by Weidenfeld & Nicolson

• Paris ’44: The Shame and the Glory by Patrick Bishop is published by Penguin/Viking (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

A handwritten manuscript of the classic French novel L’Étranger by Albert Camus has sold for more than €650,000 (£553,000) at auction, despite bafflement over the reasons for which the Nobel prize-winning author appeared to have faked and backdated it.

The bound, 104-page draft of Camus’s novel about a French settler in Algeria who kills an unnamed Arab man went under the hammer in Paris on Wednesday.

But the document does not carry the usual literary insights of a scrawled and corrected first draft. Instead, it appears to have been handwritten by Camus in 1944, two years after the novel was published in France.

Why Camus, who went on to win the Nobel prize in 1957, painstakingly copied out his own published book by hand in black pen and signed and backdated it to April 1940, adding doodles, arrows and apparently humorous notes, has never been properly explained.

With Paris under Nazi occupation at the time, it is thought to have been a way for Camus to raise much-needed funds by faking a handwritten “draft” copy for a wealthy fan.

“Its history and precise dating are mysterious, as is the progress of this strange novel,” the auction house said in its notes.

The identity of the first buyer of Camus’s fake manuscript is unknown. It was later sold at auction twice, in 1958 and 1991.

L’Étranger, translated in English as The Stranger or The Outsider, had an initial print run of 4,400 copies, but quickly became a bestseller and then a classic of French literature, selling millions of copies.

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Alice Kaplan, a professor at Yale and the author of Looking for the Stranger: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic, told Le Figaro she had not seen the manuscript, but that the notion of a fake first draft was intriguing. “I really like the idea of the philosophical puzzle that this document contains … If Camus copies out his own text by hand, is that a fake?” she asked.

This is the latest installment of Public Streets, an urban observation series created by Ellis Avery and curated by Abigail Struhl.

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Confined to my small Brooklyn apartment, I often dream about Paris, about walking for hours in heeled sandals until the straps cut into my ankles. In Paris, I never feel discomfort, only the thrill of discovering new swaths of the city. My mind now wanders to its streets: the scent of rotisserie chicken wafting from a butcher shop, the Seine curving through the city and splitting it in half, the apartment buildings with their cast-iron balconies.

But alongside these familiar areas, I return to a view of the city’s skyline from a high perch in the 20th arrondissement, the top of Parc de Belleville. The altitude is a few meters below that of Sacré-Cœur, and I am removed from the humdrum of visitors, from the picturesque streets and iconic stairways made famous in Amélie and other films. The last time I was in Belleville, I spotted no tourists. No one pressed against the terrace railing for a photograph, and it is this uninterrupted view that I so miss. The winter fog had lifted to reveal a white sky. In the distance, I saw the Eiffel Tower and the Tour de Montparnasse, rising above all the other buildings.

My father is French, and I was born in Paris. I spent my early childhood away in Australia and came back to the suburbs of Paris for my adolescence. At 17 I left France a second time, for America, but I always found reasons to return—jobs and internships that pushed me to explore parts of the city I never thought to venture to as a high schooler.

I came across Parc de Belleville during one of those summers spent working in Paris, while in graduate school. I had met an American poet at a reading, a young man who wore button-down shirts and carried a battered leather briefcase. He was a fellow at a prestigious university. At first glance, he embodied the cliché of the American writer in Paris, and, yet, he spoke gently and without pretension. I liked him instantly. He was an attentive listener and a welcome companion for my long walks. I sought to impress him with my knowledge of a Paris that wasn’t saturated with tourists or English-speakers—a Paris I had found while traversing the streets in my spare time. Not Shakespeare & Co., nor the terrible cafés close to Île de la Cité that served us stale bread and pre-cut cheese.

I studied a map of Paris and looked for neighborhoods that were less familiar to me, closer to the outskirts. My eye was drawn to the small patch of greenery in the 20th arrondissement, not far from Buttes-Chaumont. This is how I chose Parc de Belleville, almost on a whim.

From métro Pyrénées we walked along the rue de Belleville before turning left onto rue Piat, toward the upper entrance of the park. We almost missed the first entrance: a cluster of trees behind a low iron gate, flanked by two nondescript buildings. We entered through a narrow passage surrounded by thick vegetation and followed the path with the sensation that we had stumbled upon a secret garden. Later, I would learn about another entrance, a few meters farther ahead, one that leads to the Belvédère Willy Ronis, named after the photographer. The sand-colored pavilion has floor-to-ceiling windows on the lower level—it once housed a museum, now closed since 2013—and above is a cobblestoned terrace with tall concrete pillars. On these pillars, famous street artist Seth has painted colorful dreamlike murals of children floating up, their heads disappearing in the clouds.

Stand against the railing, between two pillars decorated with mosaics made by children from the neighborhood—they used found objects such as glass and broken ceramics—and you will find a panoramic view of Paris. While it wasn’t remarkably different from the one at Montmartre, it made me pause. I heard children splashing in the fountains, conversations among friends enjoying an apéro on the grass, wind stirring through the trees. It is rare, on a summer evening in Paris, to find this sort of quiet along with the spectacular sensation of having the city at your feet.

Parc de Belleville is a vertical park. It was built on a hillside, in 1988, as part of an effort to revitalize the neighborhood. Much of the neighborhood, deemed insalubrious at the time, was torn down and replaced with modern apartment buildings. Several of these are 10 to 15 stories high and can be seen from the terrace. The park’s elevation of 108 meters makes it one of the highest points in Paris. Narrow cobblestoned paths wind down the hillside, surrounded by lush canopies. Several flights of stairs connect to the bottom at rue des Couronnes. A long cascade made of shallow rectangular pools runs along the central pathway.

In warm weather, picnickers gather on the sloped strips of lawn, alongside an eclectic array of plants: wildflowers, weeds, heads of cabbage, clusters of bamboo. Or they sit on the steps above an open-air theater—a circular stage at the bottom of the shuttered museum. Here, we are far from the manicured gardens of the Luxembourg and the Tuileries and their wide gravel lanes. Parc de Belleville has curves and wild, lush greenery, but also trimmed hedges and a symmetrical rectangular fountain that runs from top to bottom. It feels both modern and a little old.

The poet and I lost our way walking the twisting paths up and down the hillside, before pausing at the Belvédère. It was almost dinnertime. The sun dipped low on the horizon, and parents gathered their children to leave the park. In this dim evening light, we looked at Paris, her contours blurred from summer pollution. We held our breaths. I couldn’t understand why there were so few of us.

I preferred the park at dusk, when the evening sun cast a pale golden light on the Belvédère, and the shallow pools reflected a hazy sky.

Belleville, in northeastern Paris, is a diverse and historically working-class neighborhood. During the Middle Ages, abbeys operated vineyards on its rich agricultural land. By the 1800s, Belleville was famous for its taverns and guinguettes—outdoor drinking establishments and small cabarets—where the wine, exempt from Paris taxes, was cheaper than within the city walls. (As a nod to this history, a small vineyard was planted in the park in 1992 and yields two varieties of grapes, chardonnay and pinot meunier.)

The town was absorbed into Paris in the 1860s, when Haussmann renovated the city center by building large avenues for the bourgeoisie, thus forcing the working class to relocate to the peripheries, such as Belleville. In the 20th century, Belleville became a destination for immigrants and refugees from Eastern Europe, former colonies in Africa, and, more recently, Asia. It is known to have some of the best Chinese grocery stores in town.

The neighborhood is also marked by a history of rebellion and political activism. It was one of the last standing barricades for the revolutionaries during the 1871 Commune of Paris, a short-lived insurrection against the government of the Third Republic, and has retained its militant and bohemian spirit over the years. Just north of the park is the headquarters of the French Communist Party. More recently, signs of gentrification can be seen in the shifting demographic and hip new establishments, and, yet, the layers of cultures, its militant and bohemian spirit, and a thriving artist community are ever-present.

Although the poet and I didn’t go back to Belleville that summer, I would return on my own in the years to come. I preferred the park at dusk, when the evening sun cast a pale golden light on the Belvédère, and the shallow pools reflected a hazy sky.

As I write this now, the parks in Paris are closed to the public, though they may reopen in the next few weeks as the city loosens its restrictions. My parents no longer live in France, and I have spent my adult life in New York. And, yet, when I imagine home, it’s Paris I see. I know that, as is the case for many of us who long for our hometowns and cities, the Paris I remember no longer exists. But still, I wonder when I’ll be able to return. I know that when I do, I’ll make my way to Parc de Belleville, and lean against the terrace railing. From there, the outline of the city will reveal itself. Slated rooftops and uneven chimneys, tall monuments flaring into the horizon.

 

This article was commissioned by Abigail Struhl. 

Featured image: Parc de Belleville, Paris. Photograph by Geoffroy Bablon