Fortunes of France 1: The Brethren

A poetic evocation of the French diplomat’s encounters and experiences, filtered through the one constant in his life-Venice.

Diplomat, writer and poet, traveller and socialite, friend of Proust, Giraudoux and Malraux, Paul Morand was out of the most original writers of the twentieth century. He was French literature's globe-trotter, and his delightful autobiography is far from being yet another account of a writer's life. Instead it is a poetic evocation of certain scenes among Morand's rich and varied encounters and experience, filtered through the one constant in his life-the one place to which he would always return-Venice.

Admired both by Ezra Pound and by Marcel Proust as a pioneer craftsman of Modernist French prose (...) The sheer shapeliness of his prose recalls Hemingway; the urbanity of his self-destructiveness compares with Fitzgerald's; and his camera eye is as lucidly stroboscopic as that of Dos Passos. He is, like Victor Segalen, Blaise Cendrars, Valery Larbaud, and Saint-John Perse, one of the great nomads of 20th-century French literature, racing through the apocalypse with the haste and glamor of an Orient Express. It is a pity we should have had to wait this long to catch up with him. --The New York Times

Venices is balanced by the sharpness of the imagery. He writes in a melancholy vein of the loves, jealousies and regrets he has experienced in Venice ... Exquisitely translated, Venices is a travel memoir of the highest order. -- IAN THOMSON, Sunday Times