Haussmann, or the Distinction

"My favorite book of the year is Haussmann, or the Distinction . . . I haven't heard so much music in a book in a long time."—Dave Eggers, Interview

"Imaginative . . . Compelling storytelling . . . We can't help reading on."—The New York Times Book Review

"LaFarge is a confident, tireless trickster and yarn spinner . . . A magician on the scale of Prospero."—San Francisco Chronicle

"LaFarge is a master storyteller with cleverness and inventiveness to spare . . . [An] ambitious, playful novel . . . full of artful prose, wit, and provocative ideas."—The Philadelphia Inquirer

"With his dazzling gift for bringing irretrievable cities to life, LaFarge conjures sinuous, melancholic otherworlds that feel wholly tangible."—The Village Voice

"Haussmann designed cities; LaFarge designs worlds—splendid, elegant edifices built on the rubble of our dreams and history."—Colson Whitehead, author of John Henry Days

"Haussmann, or the Distinction is a stunning and wise historical novel. As deeply imagined as Dickens's London, Paul LaFarge's Paris is a cityscape of rubble and grandeur, of poverty and greed, and of the sweeping scene of a changing social order. The aims of this brilliant work go beyond the re-creation of history to the contemplation of what we make of history; why we are seduced by the new, yet yearn for the re-creation of a carnival past. The characters in this moving drama of love, betrayal, and exploitation are so beautifully drawn that they call to mind what fiction should be."—Maureen Howard

"LaFarge's novel offers various pleasures on almost every page. Like a fine French dinner, with many entrees and no exits, the book deserves to be slowly savored."—The News & Observer (North Carolina)

2"LaFarge has a fine historical imagination coupled with considerable narrative gifts."—Chicago Tribune

"LaFarge is a grandly inventive, elegant writer, and his nineteenth-century Paris is far more than a fictional echo of history. It is a city full of vivid experience—love, death, ambition, failure, ghosts, cacophony, music, and unforgettable beauty."—Joanna Scott

"An original and engrossing novel . . . LaFarge's storytelling instincts are superb, and his novel captures precisely the shadowy, misty affectation of France in the Second Empire."—The Virginia Quarterly Review

"As a tale of love, longing, and obsession, Haussmann is both moving and vast. LaFarge creates and populates his own kind of Paris, a place that inhibits history but frequently flirts with, and is often seduced by, imagination. A kind of nostalgic fiction, Haussmann is a novel in the classic, sweeping style of Balzac and Hugo, yet it maintains its modernity. It is a vainglorious past as seen through the scrim of a pedestrian and not-too-cynical present. By turns hilarious and magical, Haussmann is, in the end, entirely enchanting."—The Missouri Review