Lauren Elkin on her book Flaneuse
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I interviewed Lauren Elkin about her new book Fl\\xe2neuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London at her apartment in the Belleville neighbourhood of Paris. Stepping off a rather ordinary, noisy street through a large pair of solid French (!) doors, I encountered a lovely, quiet, tree-lined pathway/courtyard en route to "an airy, comfortable writer\'s home, filled with books, art, plants, and even a piano."
\\xa0 To start with, Elkin suggests that the fl\\xe2neur is "the quintessentially masculine figure of privilege and leisure who strides the capitals of the world with abandon," and that the fl neuse is a \\u201cdetermined, resourceful individual keenly attuned to the creative potential of the city and the liberating possibilities of a good walk.\\u201d Virginia Woolf called it \\u201cstreet haunting\\u201d; Holly Golightly epitomized it in Breakfast at Tiffany\\u2019s; and Patti Smith did it in her own inimitable style in 1970s New York." \\xa0 Nonetheless since the fl\\xe2neur has not, historically, been a very precisely drawn male character, we should be free, says Elkin, to define the fl\\xe2neuse as we see fit, not as a female equivalent, but as an entity unto herself.'