That scores of people celebrate a fish festival every September on the island best known for Georges Seurat’s masterpiece “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte” (the inspiration as well for Stephen Sondheim’s musical “Sunday in the Park With George”). That Paris spends more than $15 million a year on public lighting. That the “team” who lit Paris bridges, monuments and boulevards with surgical knives of illumination in the 1980s was led by a single genius, François Jousse. Regrettably, I’m afraid I have no memory of that occasion she sounds as if she’d be the perfect American fellow-traveler in France.Īlthough I’ve written books about Paris or set there, I never researched the Seine and so never knew some of the many things Sciolino tells us: She has lived in Paris, working for The New York Times, only since 2002 I moved there in 1983 and returned to America in 1998. Typically, the French (for whom philosophy is a high school requirement) can brachiate from abstraction to abstraction and might become disgruntled when we Americans say, “Give me an example.” Sciolino, on the contrary, proceeds from colorful detail to revealing detail, gently informing even as she entertains.įull disclosure: The Book Review editors asked if I knew Sciolino before assigning me this review. The French pride themselves on conversing on a lofty plane when Americans start exchanging anecdotes or matching experiences, many French people raise an eyebrow and ask, “Eh, alors?” (What’s your point?) They want to know the principle that can be drawn from all this real-life trivia.

Elaine Sciolino is a graceful, companionable writer, someone who speaks about France in the most enjoyably American way.

The seine elaine sciolino