Flaneuse by Lauren Elkin: book review

Flaneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London (2015) is set on the streets of well-known global cities.

What is a flaneuse? A flaneuse is a female ‘idler, a dawdling observer, usually found in cities.’ The author is the flaneuse – as she walks the streets of cities, observing, dawdling, enjoying, being, and occassionally getting lost, although it doesn’t matter how lost she is because she is always somewhere. It all adds to her imagination, inspiration, and creativity.

A flaneuse is not walking aimlessly. She is taking a cultural walk, exploring streets, paths, lanes, and alleys: ‘I walk because it confers – or restores – a feeling of placeness… I walk because, somehow, it’s like reading.’

The author begins in Paris from the late nineteenth century to the 1920s, to New York in the 1970s, and back to Paris in 1999 with the books of Jean Rhys. In London the author is attending a conference, and walks the streets of Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury days.

As the author walks the streets, she places herself in the shoes of previous female walkers – famous and celebrated female walkers – George Sand, Martha Gellhorn, and Sophie Calle, to mention a few. Virginia Wolf, in 1927, didn’t call it flaneusing or street walking – she called it ‘street haunting.’

Elkin writes of revolution, the Occupy Movement, obedience, disobedience, observation, fitting in, and being a fish out of water. She writes of curiosity and commitment to a place, independence, inspiration, and insight. But she writes mainly of Paris.

The author focuses on the feminine flaneuse. She criss-crosses cities – going somewhere and coming back again ‘for these roads are not straight, but have several revolutions’. It is not orderly and not chronological. Readers can dip in and out of the narrative, and take what they want from this rambling travel memoir.

MARTINA NICOLLSis an international aid and development consultant, and the authorof:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom(2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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