Flâneuse - by Lauren Elkin

I’m not entirely sure where to start with Flâneuse, and I’m not sure I want to finish it either. 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’s even better aloud.

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.

What I treasure most is 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. At this writing I have two chapters left, but I never want our urban promenade to end.