Paris When It Is Naked Journal #8

Intro to Close Reading

Friday Section

May 3, 2013

Journal #8                                                                            Week #4

         I have been reading through the book Paris, When It’s Naked by Etel Adnan and I believe that there is something about the writing style that draw me to the book. Its structure is very much contemporary and can relate to everyone’s thoughts and their everyday life. I love how Adnan describes every scenery and people with beautiful imageries and amazing details. This gives a contemporary French vibe to the book. I really like how she uses metaphors and similes like “You can go on and living like a fish in the huge aquarium of Paris, and feel safe licking with your eyes and the window of the pastry-shops. You can also burn, with prayers in the stomach instead of bread, if you go more to the south, and cross the Mediterranean, and stay there if you decide. Who among us have such guts? I, for one, don’ t seem to have them” (Adnan 10). Her elegant use of language describes the racism going on in France and her sensitivity to France’s anti-immigrant and nationalism toward foreigners and particularly African and Middle Eastern immigrants   But what interest me the most in this book is the way she uses the rain to incorporate it into her feelings when she wrote this book. She repeats the “rain” many times in this book and its symbolism. For example, she wrote "But is Sicily European, really? Are we going to integrate these hot southern countries into our nordic economies? Will it rain more, down there, once Europe gives itself a common army? . . . . What if Russians bring their winters to the western parts of Europe? How are we going to get up in the sheer blackness of Sweden's mornings at the same hours as in Paris?" She uses the “the rain” symbolism to describe her feelings about the redraw of the European map and the transformation of nation-states. Overall, the rain is like her sympathetic feelings that make her become human again since she mentions how the news makes her “dry up”. It is a very important symbol in this book because it gives a very melancholic, soft, yet hopeful tone that Adnan had toward France and the world in general.