Paris to the Moon is a love letter, exquisite and heartfelt. It is not one that a pining star-crossed lover writes, but one a soldier writes to family back home.
The Paris of lovers is well-trodden. Paris to the Moon describes the Paris of a writer with a young family.
Gopnik’s penchant for adorning unremarkable happenings with remarkable witticism makes the book lovely. In the midst of absurdities and abstractions, swimming pools and schools, gyms and dinner plates (mellow and varnished like an old violin), never-ending dossiers, parks and pregnancy, politics and futbol, Adam Gopnik, all the while failing miserably to prevent his son from learning about Barney, reflects on our forlorn life away from home, even as we are having a great time.
The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of feeling free and having escaped.
I had not read the book before our family trip to Paris. Descriptions of two trips to Jardin de Luxembourg in the book brought strong memories from our trip rushing back.
Walking in Jardin de Luxembourg with our 4-year old, we caught the puppet show, Les Trois Petite Cochon — the same show that Gopnik and his son went to. We watched in awe, taken in by our daughter’s giddy enchantment in those hand-held puppets with gigantic heads, half-bemused, lost, and puzzled by wordy French dialogue and the appearance of strange Guignol. In true French fashion, the pigs apparently had to let in the wolf, because he had come from the city government to check the water meter. (I finally got the details filled in through the book).
The book ends with Gopniks’ winter trip to a carousel, in a forlorn effort to relive their memories from a visit five years back. The carousel at Luxembourg Gardens is indeed one highlight of the joy of family life in Paris.
The carousel at Luxembourg Gardens is uniquely French. There is no clockwork of tingling bells or automated carousel music. Instead, we are filled with the rhythmic clangs of wood on metal, and the squeals of children in their uncoordinated and unmitigated joy reaching out from wooden horses to pick rings, as the carousel spins by fast, past the half-watching fathers idly sipping their cafe noisettes.