No. 91/92: Notes on a Parisian commute
by Lauren Elkin
Les Fugitives, £8.99

OVER a period of seven months in 2015, Franco-US writer Lauren Elkin noted particulars of her bus journeys to and from work in central Paris.

The project was intended as a means of observing the world through her phone’s Notes app, “rather than to use my phone to distract myself from the world.” Taking as her guidance a focus on the “infra-ordinary” as set out by Georges Perec, founder of the “workshop of potential literature” Oulipo, the goal was to pay attention to the everyday micro events of a mundane journey in building a record of experience.

Elkin is known for the 2016 bestseller Flaneuse: Women Walk the City, her critique of male domination of the written city. Here she becomes a Flanenbus, well prepared for the journey.

In her foreword she links her notation of those miniscule actions within the quotidian maelstrom of rush-hour events to the Bataclan catastrophe as well as to her own personal loss: “The hardest thing to make sense of was how in an instant, the everyday can become an Event,” Elkin writes.

Presented as a chronological diary, this is a scroll-book of short entries, reminiscent of somewhat elongated social media feeds, although several entries are single sentences. Within such tight confines, certain vivid images are captured: a woman says the rosary, another “practices piano fingering on her handbag,” a guy “manspreads.”

There is also the sense of bus-transport’s frustrating ineffectuality — an allegory of democracy perhaps — in the never-ending crawl along Boulevard du Montparnasse, passing “one Haussmanian building every couple of minutes” or the frequent just-misses and subsequent long waits in the cold.

The book’s last section is a manifesto of sorts. Elkin cites Oulipians again as being “never so happy as when they’re on a bus,” and how their stories tell us how to live together. This strains the genre somewhat, almost as though there is an awareness that the book’s content, notes after all, is slight and needs such affirmation.

The perspective, tracking backwards from the Bataclan massacre, weighing up the import of daily mundanities and the traces of fragile life left behind, is an attempt to bring experiences’ poignance to the fore.

Detail is essential to construct this and, though not fluent, I wanted more in French — the granular texture of everyday French needs rendering in its mother tongue.

Yet the book is a lovely object and leaves a resonance of the beautiful city, with the dignity of human lives and our communality redefined.

Published by Les Fugitives, £8.99, on September 7.