Book Review
To Walk Alone in a Crowd (2021)
by Antonio Munoz Molina
This is a new English language translation of Munoz-Molina's 2018 ode to the flaneur. Originating in 19th century France, the flaneur was (usually) a man who took pleasure in lengthy walks around a city (Paris) and coming into contact with different levels of society. Prior to the entry of the flaneur into Western culture, the idea that someone with means would purposefully chose to expose themselves to the lower rungs of society was controversial, to say the least. Indeed, often times the whole idea of wealth and status was to segregate yourself from the less fortunate. Flaneurs were also among the first to actually LIKE the experience of living inside a city, and appreciate the aesthetics of the city itself, again, controversial at the time.
Flaneur-ism has maintained a vibrancy that has long outlasted the original French version. There is an entire literary movement, called "psycho-geography" that mostly consists of lengthy descriptions of prosaic urban environments in time and history, and it's impossible to ignore the impact of flaneurism on most literary subcultures since the advent of modernism.
To Walk Alone in a Crowd is not exactly a novel, but it is centered around writers and their experiences in various cities, Walter Benjamin, on the run from the Nazi's, Fernando Pessoa in Lisbon, Edgar Allan Poe in Boston and Baltimore. Melville in New York. He combines personal observations with actual history based research, for example:
A great step forward will take place when different routes are juxtaposed. From 1846 to 1849, Poe, Whitman, and Melville are all living, working, and walking simultaneously through New York City, orbiting around a small number of magnetic poles: a particular bookstore, the offices of a handful of literary journals, the houses of a few cultured people that hold soirees.
He speculates on the intersection of literary lives:
There is a kind of invisibility to Herman Melville, as if lost or perpetually estranged among the people walking down the street with him, or in the smaller sphere of his literary circles, the bookstores and cafés. Walt Whitman, who was his exact contemporary, must have crossed paths with him. When Melville’s first book was published Whitman wrote a favorable review in a Brooklyn paper. Melville was a reader of Poe, and both frequented the same bookstore in New York, whose owner they knew well. But they never met, or if they ran into each other now and then, to the point of becoming familiar strangers, we will never know it. Melville walked quickly, in long strides. He said Broadway was a Mississippi flowing through Manhattan. During a trip to London in 1850 he spent his days exploring alleyways and courtyards, bookstores, theaters, cafés, dubious streets he would have avoided in other people’s company, where women stood at the corners offering themselves under the gaslight.
The rest of the book is mostly about the narrator and his desire for a rootless existence:
YOU CHOOSE WHAT YOU WANT AND WHEN YOU WANT IT. I want to live like this, unencumbered, taking walks, reading books, carrying a backpack with notebooks and pencils, wearing a pair of sturdy hiking boots that give a slight elastic impulse to my heels and to the muscles in my legs, the head of the femur sliding in the hip socket, the strength of the hip, an ancient bone, the base on which the spinal column rests. I want to live on foot, by hand, by pencil, at ease, responsive to whatever I meet, loose like the air that moves around my body as I walk or like a graceful swimming stroke. I want to remain astonished.
I unabashedly loved To Walk Alone in a Crowd, and I find myself thinking about it weeks later, and going back to some of the authors he mentions- Edgard Allan Poe, for example, and rereading some of his tales.
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