Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice & London
Lauren Elkin
Chatto & Windus
What do you call someone who ambles around town with no particular destination, floating along the footpath, drinking in the sights and sounds and smells, simultaneously part of the crowd and apart? Do we have a word for that?
We don’t, as a matter of fact. But the French do. This someone is a flâneur and almost always a man in the popular imagination. With this book, Elkin hopes to track down the female equivalent – the flâneuse – to ‘see where a woman might fit into the cityscape.’
The reader is taken on a long meander that intersperses Elkin’s personal wanderings with those of Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf, and George Sand. En route, we also encounter key spatial thinkers like Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord and Yi-Fu Tuan. It is a timely effort: in the Trump era of manspreading and male privilege, it is especially vital that we pay attention to notions of gendered space.
Elkin’s prose is wry, insightful and saturated with detail. But it lags in the middle, feeling at times like the literary equivalent of a 4-hour walking tour… Your mind wanders, your belly rumbles and your feet ache despite your goodwill towards the knowledgeable and entertaining guide.
The book would pack twice the punch if Elkin concentrated only on her birthplace of New York and her adopted home of Paris. Nevertheless, it is a compelling read and the central message has never been more pertinent: ‘Space is not neutral. Space is a feminist issue.’
Words – Sam Ford
