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Last Nights of Paris
by
Philippe Soupault
general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author
| Title: | Last Nights of Paris |
| Author: | Philippe Soupault |
| Genre: | Novel |
| Written: | 1928 (Eng. 1929) |
| Length: | 230 pages |
| Original in: | French |
| Availability: | Last Nights of Paris - US |
| Last Nights of Paris - UK | |
| Last Nights of Paris - Canada | |
| Les dernières nuits de Paris - Canada | |
| Les dernières nuits de Paris - France | |
| Die letzten Nächte von Paris - Deutschland | |
| Las últimas noches de París - España | |
| from: Bookshop.org (US) |
- French title: Les dernières nuits de Paris
- Translated by William Carlos Williams
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Our Assessment:
B : nicely shadowy novel of nighttime Paris
See our review for fuller assessment.
| Source | Rating | Date | Reviewer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rev. of Contemp. Fiction | . | Fall/1993 | Brooke Horvath |
From the Reviews:
- "Last Nights is a modest example of surrealism. It is, however, a haunting depiction of a world in which the characters find themselves both the ghosts and the spooked." - Brooke Horvath, Review of Contemporary Fiction
Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.
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The complete review's Review:
Last Nights of Paris is indeed very much a nocturnal novel.
The narrator does not say or focus much on his everyday life -- or, rather, his everyday life seems to largely be consumed by rambling and drifting through Parisian streets and neighborhoods in the depths of night, with occasional visits to cafés and bars.
He is a kind of a flâneur, but not of the purest sort; if he rarely pursues a specific destination, he is often a follower, shadowing other deep-night walkers (and not only on foot: occasionally also motor vehicles are involved).
Typically:
He did not see me but continued on his way. I hesitated a moment to follow him, but curiosity was too strong and as silently as possible I fell into his pace.There's a noirish element to the novel, though it's not a straightforward crime story. The narrator does move among prostitutes and underworld-types, and there is a violent, horrific crime -- but, although he's curious about elements of (and participants in) it, he almost shrugs it off, as it is:
A commonplace crime, that's all, said I half aloud. I was disappointed; it so happened that at this time the discovery of bags full of limbs, carefully sawed off and chopped up, was an almost daily occurrence.His obsession begins with a woman, Georgette. She is a prostitute, but that seems almost incidental; like several of the figures the narrator deals with, her identity and nature are not fixed, and the narrator repeatedly notes the shifts in how she presents herself, and how he perceives her. She, and her essence, remain elusive, and he repeatedly describes her as a 'shadow' -- and notes that: "what gave her person a charm that could be described as special was her resemblance to a shadow" --; unsurprisingly, she disappears for a time, too.
At one point, he wonders if he can puncture the image he has of her by taking advantage of her services, and he hires her as a prostitute -- but the act itself here then barely rates a mention:
The precision of her queries and of her gestures at the moment of undressing made me doubt her existence. She folded her garments and placed them on the chair with the disconcerting rapidity of a juggler.This creature of the night is only lost when: "Day had taken possession of her".
In all the exchanges which followed, she showed the same detached virtuosity.
Then she went on her way and left me at once astonished and reassured. I had almost the desire to applaud.
Another significant character the narrator deals with is Volpe -- "man of legend, at once celebrated and unknown". Typically for the figures in the novel, that is not his real name; as Soupault nicely puts it: "He goes by so many names that it's not known whether he really has one".
Translator Williams called the novel 'Dadaist', but it is reasonably straightforward, a novel of wandering the night and exploring some of its (human) creatures and their relationships and acts, veiled in darkness and the mysteries of human ways. It is a novel of seeing Paris differently, with Georgette as the key for the narrator -- as:
Georgette resumed her stroll about Paris, through the mazes of the night. She went on, dispelling sorrow, solitude or tribulation. Then more than ever did she display her strange power: that of transfiguring the night. Thanks to her, who was no more than one of the hundred thousands, the Parisian night became a mysterious domain, a great and marvelous country, full of flowers, of birds, of glances and of stars, a hope launched into space .... Slave of my impressions, I thought of a velodrome.It makes for a dreamy, shadowy novel, quite successful in its evocative ambitions.
The English version of Last Nights of Paris is also notable because the translation is by poet William Carlos Williams -- author Soupault noting in a preface to a later edition that: "I often walked around with him in the streets of the capital". Williams also refers to the translation in Paterson:
What has happened
since Soupault gave him the novel
the Dadaist novel
to translate
The Last Nights of Paris.
"What has happened to Paris
since that time?
and to myself" ?
"A WORLD OF ART
THAT THROUGH THE YEARS HAS
SURVIVED !
- M.A.Orthofer, 17 July 2024
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Last Nights of Paris:
- Exact Change publicity page
- Gallimard publicity page
- Verlag das Wunderhorn publicity page
- Jus publicity page
- See Index of French literature
- See Index of Books Written Between 1900 and 1945
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French author Philippe Soupault lived 1897 to 1990.
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© 2024 the complete review
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