An insider’s guide to life as an expat in Paris

Non-fiction

Simon Kuper may be an outsider in Paris, but he's very much at ease

Eoin O’Malley

There was a time in the early 1990s when travelogues were a publishing phenomenon. They usually went along the lines of: Sophisticated Anglo expat (never immigrant) travels to some rural part of southern Europe and buys a property. He (always he) encounters all sorts of difficulties with local builders and bureaucrats, delivering an exasperated monologue of how backward and insular the whole place is. Over time, and after some hilarious japes, our sophisticated Anglo hero learns to see the wisdom of local customs and traditions.

Simon Kuper’s Impossible City: Paris in the Twenty-first Century looks at the outset to be a book along those lines, except for a large, sophisticated world city, Paris, and 30 years too late. But his eye is keener and less partisan. As someone who is a citizen of nowhere – born and brought up in a series of countries not his own – Kuper is a foreigner in Paris. As a writer for the Financial Times, with an American wife and now French children, he seems an embodiment of the educated global elite.