Lauren Elkin is the author of Flâneuse.
For an unsexy book about sex addiction, you can’t do much better than Leïla Slimani’s Adèle. The new novel from the writer of the bestselling, Prix Goncourt-winning Lullaby (2016) asks the reader to watch uncomfortably as its protagonist moves from man to man, having many sexual encounters but zero orgasms. Adèle, an attractive Parisian woman in her thirties,...
New Yorkers have been mobbing the Charles Marville exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (until 4 May). ‘Paris has gotten so expensive,’ I overheard one woman saying to her friend. ‘I used to stay at the Meurice all the time but now it’s $1500 a night!’ Marville was hired as Paris's official photographer in the 1860s to preserve traces of the old city, but also to capture Haussmannisation in action, the demolition and rebuilding necessitated by the new streets, regularised building façades and such monuments as Garnier’s new opera house. Still, to judge from the response of the crowds at the Met, it's the vanished cobblestones and shadowy courtyards, not the rubble and scaffolding, that are the stars of the show.
Jean Cocteau had a genius for being seen. As an elegant young man, with the cult poet Anna de Noailles on his arm, thanks to an introduction from Proust, he danced the polka at the Bastille...
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