The Secret Life of the Seine

When Mort Rosenblum, world-weary foreign correspondent, moved aboard a 54-foot boat moored in the center of Paris, he knew that life would be sweet. Damp perhaps. And sometimes ripe with the smell of diesel fuel. But sunning himself on deck for the first time, in sight of characters out of Hugo or Flaubert, enjoying his view of the Eiffel Tower as the wake from a bateau-mouche sloshed the Burgundy in his wine glass, he realized that he had entered a separate "arrondissement" of the spirit, a Paris that even most Parisians would have sworn vanished decades ago. In The Secret Life of the Seine, Rosenblum is our guide to life along the river, and to the many pleasures unique to this main artery of the heart of France. We get to know his own floating village between the Pont de l'Alma and the Pont de la Concorde, but then setting out from Paris, he takes us to the river's source near Dijon, through the provinces of Burgundy and Champagne, past castles and abbeys and cherry orchards, through a thousand years of French history and culture, on to Normandy, where the Seine empties at last into the sea at Le Havre. Along the way the narrative shifts from the art of navigation and commerce to the art of Monet and Renoir, but the focus is always on people, the citizens of the Seine. Rosenblum's neighbors range from the occasional movie star or reclusive novelist to reformed bums and fallen aristocrats meeting in the bohemian middle. With their boats moored three deep against the quai, they form a unique symbiosis of overlapping bow lines and power cables, and, given the close quarters, distinctive rules of etiquette - "please understand if I do not seem to see you when we look at each other." And many could lay claim to Travis McGee's title of "world's longest continuous floating party." There are the floating restaurants and the ruins of old bordellos, the tourist boats, the lovers on the quais at night, and the nearly naked sunbathers there by day. But there is a more serious side to the Seine as well. The river cops and fishermen, and above all, the bargees, whole families still trying to make a living hauling freight through the rivers and canals of Europe. It is Rosenblum's depiction of their distinctive - and declining - way of life that gives the book its special pathos. Ultimately, The Secret Life of the Seine is about pleasure, a love story between man and boat and the river they live on, a discourse on the sensual beauty of France and the art of living well.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.