Flow Chart of Paris

Books are no substitute for experience, and yet for most of us certain places are either out of reach or too expensive to inhabit for more than a tourist’s week or two; we nourish and enhance our geographic obsessions by reading. Paris is one of the great destinations not only of the traveler but of the reader. And even Parisians have been known to escape to a Paris that exists only in books: Baudelaire, mourning the destruction of the medieval city by Baron Haussmann’s modernization projects, invoked Virgil’s image of enslaved Andromache weeping a small river (the Simois) over a doll-size replica of lost Troy in his poem “Le Cygne.” André Breton, in Nadja and Mad Love, conjured his occult project of Surrealism from the city’s chance encounters, not least between the present and the dreamy past, its flea markets and arcana. Walter Benjamin’s unfinished manuscript Das Passagen-Werk was going to be a study of the city’s vanished nineteenth-century shopping arcades: his notes are mainly composed of quotations from literature. Like the murmur of an underground stream (as Auden might say), the subtextual message is always I’m too late. Lisa Robertson’s Riverwork draws on all these influ...