Flaneuse by Lauren Elkin
I think I wanted to like this book more than I really ended up liking it.
This is non-fiction, subtitled "Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London".
I am a woman who has always loved meandering around cities, hanging out in cafes, reading books about people (particularly women) who do similar things. I have lived in or visited all the cities she writes about. I should have loved this.
Some parts I did like; the first chapter in particular, where she defines and discusses the concept of 'flaneuse' (a made-up female version of the word 'flaneur', which is a man of leisure and culture who strolls the city streets and ponders on life), and how women have not had the freedom to claim the streets as their own in the same way that men have, how women cannot be invisible on the streets and blend into the background as an observer, in the way that a male flaneur has always been able to do.
She writes quite a lot about her own experiences in the various cities, but just as much (if not more) about a number of female authors and the cities they walked in and wrote about: Virginia Woolf in London, George Sand and Jean Rhys in Paris etc. Some of this was interesting, but when it came to the chapter on Agnes Varda, a french film maker, she basically recounted an entire 1960s film about a woman walking around Paris for two hours, which made it feel like the longest chapter in the book. Maybe it would have helped if I had heard of Varda or seen the film. The chapter on Martha Gellhorn also seemed a bit shoehorned into the theme of the book, as if she wanted to write about Gellhorn so was going to fit her in no matter what.
And the chapter on Tokyo, where she lived off and on for a while with her ex-fiancee as their relationship fell apart, had me wanting to scream at her that of course Tokyo is an eminently walkable city, she was just in the wrong bit of it and obviously didn't pull herself together to go out to explore properly (some of my most enjoyable days of flanerie have been in the quirky backstreets and side streets and cafes of Tokyo).
Overall, I am glad I read this; there were parts that explored ideas in interesting ways and references to people and books I am likely to look up, but it turned out to be more of a mishmash of personal memoir, snippets of literary biographies and meditation on life in general than the book about women and cities that I had been expecting.