We’ll Always Have Paris!

Abstract

Jeanne Fuchs reviews Agnès Poirier’s Left Bank: Art, Passion, and the Rebirth of Paris, 1940–1950 (Henry Holt and Company), a history of Parisian intellectual and artistic life through the Nazi Occupation, the Liberation, and the postwar years. Fuchs praises the book’s map, chronology, and cast list, its account of the Louvre’s wartime evacuation, and its portraits of Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Arthur Koestler, along with American visitors including the young Norman Mailer, in Paris on the GI Bill, meeting Jean Malaquais. She notes occasional abrupt transitions but calls the book a tour de force of style and organization.