Cover of recent edition of Brassai's "Paris by Night" (5th edition, Flammarion, 2004).

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Livres Photos:
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Gaito Gazdanov's Paris / 51

Night Roads also documents a time and place – the squalid underside of Paris in the 1920s and 1930s – that is familiar to readers of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, Louis Ferdinand Celine's Journey to the End of the Night and George Orwell's Down and Out in London and Paris. Brassai’s famous 1933 collection of photos, Paris by Night, could serve as a visual companion to these books as well as to Night Roads.

Miller, Celine, and Orwell, each in their own way, immersed themselves in the sordid world they wrote about but they reacted to it differently. Celine wrote out of despair, Miller professed to embrace everything, and Orwell documented evils that he still hoped a coming revolution would wash away.

Gazdanov's taxi driver, in contrast, stands apart from what he observes. As Elena Balzanno points out in the preface to her translation,

"Two sentences come back like a refrain and translate the narrator’s reaction to the events which cast him sometimes as a witness, sometimes as an actor: “I shrugged my shoulders”, “I couldn’t get used to it”. His attitude oscillates between these two extremes, between resignation and indignation…. " [14]