Inside a Pearl My Years in Paris

Edmund White

Bloomsbury USA, 272 pages, $26

When the well-known American writer Edmund White moved to Paris in 1983, leaving New York City in the midst of the AIDS crisis, he was 43 years old, couldn’t speak French, and only knew two people in the entire city. In Paris, he discovered the anxieties and pleasures of mastering a new culture. When he left 15 years later, he was fluent enough in his adopted tongue to broadcast on French radio and TV. He became the definitive biographer of Jean Genet; he wrote biographies of Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud; and he received the French Order of Arts and Letters. This memoir offers a brilliant examination of a city and a culture eternally imbued with an aura of enchantment.