Flâneuse - by Lauren Elkin

I’m not entirely sure where to start with Flâneuse. I’m am sure that I didn’t want it to end. I began reading it months ago, set it down for no particular reason, and recently picked it up again — this time in audiobook form. It might be even better aloud, as it allowed me to listen as I walk my own city streets, recognizing the intersections and boundaries of this place in each chapter.

I can not recommend this book enough. Elkin’s writing, brought to life exquisitely by Abby Caden’s narration, is a rich, layered exploration of cities, gender, power, politics, and culture, woven through the lives of women who walked — writers, artists, characters, and Elkin herself. She writes with such depth and clarity that you don’t just follow her through Paris, Venice, New York, and Tokyo; you inhabit these places with her. It’s literature analysis, urban theory, and memoir all at once, but it never feels academic or distant. It feels lived-in.

I treasured the feeling of walking the streets of San Francisco alone while Elkin and her companions — real, historic, and fictional — walk in their own solitude beside me. She turns the act of wandering into a kind of authorship, a way of claiming space, understanding place, the slight of hand relationship between subject and object, and seeing the city on your own terms.