Paris Vagabond

An NYRB Classics Original<br><br>Jean-Paul Cl&#233;bert was a boy from a respectable middle-class family who ran away from school joined the French Resistance and never looked back. Making his way to Paris at the end of World War II Cl&#233;bert took to living on the streets and in <i>Paris Vagabond</i> a so-called &#147;aleatory novel&#148; assembled out of sketches he jotted down at the time he tells what it was like. His &#147;gallery of faces and cityscapes on the road to extinction&#148; is an astonishing depiction of a world apart&#151;a Paris long since vanished of the poor the criminal and the outcast&#151;and a no less astonishing feat of literary improvisation: Its long looping breathless sentences streetwise profane lyrical incantatory are an adventure in their own right. Praised on publication by the great novelist and poet Blaise Cendrars and embraced by the young Situationists as a kind of manual for living off the grid <i>Paris Vagabond</i>&#151;here published with the starkly striking photographs of Cl&#233;bert&#146;s friend Patrice Molinard&#151;is a raw and celebratory evocation of the life of a city and the underside of life.