Paris Metro
Written by Wendell Steavenson
Narrated by Elisabeth Rodgers
3/5
()
About this audiobook
Wendell Steavenson
Wendell Steavenson wrote for The New Yorker from Cairo for more than a year during the Egyptian revolution. She has spent most of the past decade and a half reporting from the Middle East and the Caucasus for the Guardian, Prospect magazine, Slate, Granta and other publications. Steavenson has written two previous books, both critically acclaimed: Stories I Stole, about post-Soviet Georgia, and The Weight of a Mustard Seed, about life and morality in Saddam's Iraq and the aftermath of the American invasion. She was also a 2014 Nieman Fellow at Harvard. Steavenson currently lives in Paris.
Related to Paris Metro
Related audiobooks
We, the Survivors: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Cambodia Noir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Barcelona Dreaming: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Last Good Paradise Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Shanda: A Memoir of Shame and Secrecy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Long Way from Home Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Passage to India (Unabridged) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSummary of Rick Steves's Rick Steves Portugal Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSignals: New and Selected Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Swank Hotel Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAn Accidental Corpse Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Savage Feast: Three Generations, Two Continents, and a Dinner Table (a Memoir with Recipes) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Twelve Rooms With a View: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dogs at the Perimeter Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Art in America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Fishermen of Antioch Anthology Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Nora: A Love Story of Nora and James Joyce Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Unmade World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Snake Has All The Lines Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSwann's Way Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGateway to the Moon Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Illuminations Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Chemistry of Tears Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5From a Sealed Room Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRefund Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beverly Of Graustark Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Artist of Disappearance Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Paris Spring Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Literary Fiction For You
The Road Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Alchemist Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5It Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Song of Achilles: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of The Oxford Translators' Revolution Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Name of the Wind Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The House in the Cerulean Sea Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Remarkably Bright Creatures: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Anxious People: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes: A Hunger Games Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Yellowface: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5All the Sinners Bleed: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bright Young Women: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Flowers for Algernon Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Demon Copperhead: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Dutch House: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Hate U Give Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Tree Grows in Brooklyn Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Bell Jar Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tom Lake: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Parable of the Sower Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Stardust Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Measure: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Ocean at the End of the Lane: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Overstory Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Picture of Dorian Gray: Classic Tales Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Their Eyes Were Watching God Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The It Girl Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Reviews for Paris Metro
9 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5PARIS METRO reads like a fictionalized memoir. It follows an accomplished foreign correspondent covering the conflict in the Middle East, a role Steavenson herself has played through much of her career. A key success of the novel is her ability to conger from her professional experience a strong sense of what that life is actually like. There is constant motion in search of stories with little grounding other than to colleagues and editors. She depicts those colleagues as committed and cosmopolitan professionals with strong—often cynical—worldviews. Success requires cleverness, luck, connections and especially acceptance of the potential for danger. This lifestyle seems to provide little room for a settled family life in the usual sense. Indeed Steavenson gives us a first person fictional narrative with a deeply conflicted protagonist whose personal life is anything but usual. Instead it seems dark and unsatisfying with few unshakeable core values.The dichotomies between the professional and personal are apparent everywhere. The narrative depicts sectarian conflicts that lead to lawlessness and violence with few easy answers. Her profession leaves Catherine ("Kit") Kittredge with feelings of “contempt, black humor, (and) cynicism.” She reports on insurgents, fundamentalists, soldiers, and politicians but the most intriguing character in the book seems to be her husband, Ahmed. He is an Iraqi whose father was executed by Saddam. He had a son by a previous wife whom he never divorced before marrying Kit, but expects her to embrace. She does. Steavenson depicts Ahmad as a cipher, not unlike the Middle East in general. He may be a diplomat or a terrorist; he may be a fundamentalist or an atheist; he clearly is adept at prevarication and compartmentalization. He frequently expresses a pragmatic view of the conflict that reveals a person who seems ill suited to support Kit in her struggle with self-doubt. Ahmed tells her things like: “Don’t be fooled by crowds. Crowds are easy to buy,” and “Humanity is a luxury; you need prosperity to have humanity.”The plot follows Kit from the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 to the terrorist attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the Bataclan in Paris in 2015. Along the way she reports on the dissolution of Baghdad, the Arab Spring in Lebanon and Syria, and the refugee crisis on the Greek island of Kos. With a deft internal monologue and conversations with minor characters (Zorro the addicted photojournalist, Rousse the ill-fated illustrator, Alexandre and Jean her “godfathers”, and Little Ahmed her stepson) we witness the shaking of Kit’s core beliefs. Throughout, Steavenson is never tempted to offer easy solutions for either Kit or the Middle East.Despite its considerable strength, PARIS METRO is not without flaws. The key one seems to derive from the very nature of a reporter’s job—to be an unbiased witness. Kit moves from assignment to assignment giving the narrative an erratic feel. Just when the drama seems to build, Kit moves on to something else, leaving a frustrated reader wondering how the last event was resolved. Another problem stems from Steavenson’s overreliance on philosophical discussions among her characters where little is ever resolved. Most of this does not seem to move the story along in meaningful ways. Despite these shortcomings, the novel is a worthy read.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Written from the perspective of a journalist who covered the Iraq War and then the refugee crisis in Europe, this book sometimes feels like a novelization of the last 20 years of news. Kitty, a British-American journalist, goes to Iraq in the early 2000s to cover the conflict and meets Ahmed, an Iraqi man who challenges her preconceptions and captures her heart. She marries him and even converts to Islam to make the marriage possible. But Ahmed carried many secrets - including another wife, a son, and the mysterious work that he does. As this book races towards the 2015 Paris attacks, the challenges of truly knowing a person become clear and the questions of identify loom over the narrative.