Show caption Thousands of American soldiers march along the Champs Elysees, on 29 August 1944, four days after the liberation of Paris, France. Germany surrendered on May 7, 1945. Photograph: Peter J Carroll/AP Top 10s Top 10 books on postwar France Novelist Alex Christofi chooses books, by authors from Françoise Sagan to James Salter, that conjure an era fraught with political struggle and possibility Alex Christofi Wed 30 Aug 2017 05.53 EDT Share on Facebook

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The decades immediately after the second world war must have felt like a strange time to be alive. The French economist Jean Fourastié called them “les trente glorieuses”, the 30 glorious years of growth, reconstruction and cultural flourishing that brought France back to the world stage. The late 1970s looked pretty similar to the Paris we know now, with its heavy traffic and pressure-washed, white stone facades. Back in the early 1950s, though, whole areas of the city were slums.

At that time, the city was full of expats, existentialists, jazz, and passionate debates over communism and capitalism, individualism and the collective. It was an exciting time, but a volatile one: resistance hero Charles de Gaulle was returned to power in a military coup and there were hundreds of bombings, both by Algerian nationalists and rightwing extremists. There were riots, curfews, even massacres, in the heart of Paris.

The whole of western Europe faced difficult questions about the kind of society it was building, and in failing to answer them definitively, we ended up where we are now. In writing my second novel, Let Us Be True, I wanted to return to a time when the only thing people could agree on was that there must be a better way (and that, if there was, it should probably involve alcohol).

1. The Journals of Janet Flanner (1925-1970)

Flanner was the New Yorker’s Paris correspondent for 50 years, writing almost 700 pieces under the nom de plume Genêt. You name it, she was there. Picasso’s new exhibition? Yep. Drinking in the Deux Magots after the Liberation? You bet. Want to know what everyone was talking about in the middle of October 1961? Read the diaries. Flanner once wrote that “history looks queer when you’re standing close to it, watching where it is coming from and how it’s being made,” and she should know.



2. The Tender Hour of Twilight by Richard Seaver (2012)

The publisher Richard Seaver’s knack for being in the right place at the right time is almost Faustian. His gift appeared in Paris in the early 50s, when he declared the little-known Samuel Beckett a genius and ended up working with him not only as a publisher but as a translator. He also had Brendan Behan shouting obscenities and hammering on his door at all hours, “rotund but still young, with eyes glowing, full of life or drink” – all the more threatening because the first time this happened, Seaver had never met him before.



James Salter in Paris in 1999. Photograph: Ulf Andersen/Getty Images

3. A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter (1967)

This romance in the Burgundy town of Autun may be the only erotic novel ever to have been written where the prose is as good as the sex. (“They lie exhausted, side by side, as if just having beached a great boat.”) But it is overwhelmingly a melancholy novel, tinged with loss. “It is not the great squares of Europe that seem desolate to me,” the narrator writes, “but the myriad small towns closed tight against the traveller, towns as still as the countryside itself.”



4. Never Any End to Paris by Enrique Vila-Matas (2003)

The author begins by telling us he was once disqualified from an Ernest Hemingway lookalike contest, much to his chagrin, for not looking enough like Papa. Hemingway reminds him of his youth in Paris, an earnest young writer with a well-thumbed copy of A Moveable Feast, who spent much of his time avoiding his landlady, the novelist Marguerite Duras, to whom he owed a great deal of rent. Despite its wonderful rhythm, it has the whiff of a tall tale. But Vila-Matas would say that “truth is more important than reality”.



Jean Seberg and David Niven in the 1958 film of Bonjour Tristesse. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/Columbia

5. Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan (1954)

Sagan was only 18 when her debut novel became a sensation. In the years before the yé-yé girls and sexual liberation of the 60s, it was remarkable for presenting an emancipated young woman – albeit one who has an oddly Oedipal relationship with her father – living the high life on the Riviera. The novel is jammed awkwardly into the form of a Wildean morality tale, but the sins are related with such gusto that no one ever remembers the moral.



6. On Leave by Daniel Anselme (1957)

Daniel Anselme was a bon viveur who, one academic notes, was “often compared to Balzac for his corpulence, not the body of his work”. He could generally be found draped over a chair in a Left Bank cafe, chatting to whoever came in, from existentialists to army conscripts. These conversations led him to write On Leave, which follows three conscripts on 10 days’ leave from the Algerian war who find themselves strangers in their own country. The novel is driven by dialogue so natural you feel as if you are chatting with friends.



7. An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris by Georges Perec (1974)

An author sits in a public piazza, on a soggy day in autumn 1974, and jots down what is going on, as it occurs. Putting that kind of constraint – formal and physical – on what an author can say is a bit mad, but it’s an important notion for Oulipan authors such as him. In Oulipo, authors find that formal tricks can show us our world in a way that brings back its colourful, glorious oddity, almost as if looking through a child’s pupils (also, on occasion, writing lipograms, as I just did).



8. The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy (1958)

Some American girls are like dud avocados – they stay green forever – and Elaine Dundy’s heroine, Sally Jay Gorce, is as starry-eyed as the best of them. With dyed hair, wearing a ballgown because her other clothes are in the wash, Sally is a wonderful creation, spilling bons mots all over the shop, a progressive forerunner of Bridget Jones and Carrie Bradshaw (she even has an orgasm). Although it’s sometimes farcical, Dundy once observed that “all the impulsive, outrageous things my heroine does, I did. All the sensible things she did, I made up.”



‘A waste of talent’ … the cathedral of Sacré-Cœur, circa 1950. Photograph: Pictorial Parade/Getty Images

9. Nairn’s Paris by Ian Nairn (1968)

This idiosyncratic guide to Paris architecture is written by Ian Nairn, a professional drinker and critic. Although his descriptions are precise, his real gift is to peer into the soul of the city. For him, Sacré-Cœur is “a waste of talent” but the Pont des Arts “has the same serial precision and detachment as Monet’s observations of Rouen cathedral in the Jeu de Paume, a mile away – or of Simenon, patiently stalking human frailty in a hundred novels”.



10. After the Circus by Patrick Modiano (1992)

Set in the mid-60s, After the Circus draws us into an enigmatic romance between a young man just short of his majority and an older woman who seems reluctant to tell him everything. It’s also a great introduction to Modiano’s work, in which memory and meaning often haunts the forgotten backroads of the city. “Topographical details have a strange effect on me,” writes the narrator. “Instead of clarifying and sharpening images from the past, they give me a harrowing sensation of emptiness and severed relationships.”

