A Living Tableau of Multiculturalism: On Simon Kuper’s “Impossible City”

IN THE EARLY 1990s, Paris earned a permanent place in my heart. I lived there as a study-abroad student, an intern for ABC News, and a waiter in a 1950s-style American diner. I saw the celebrated actor Jean-Paul Belmondo perform Cyrano de Bergerac at the Théâtre Marigny. I played a poor man’s guitar on the steps of Sacré Coeur. And I attended an election night event with American expats at the Hotel Concorde, where I watched Bill Clinton defeat George H. W. Bush as the sun came up over the city.

Upon returning to Paris last spring, I happily revisited my study-abroad program in the 15th arrondissement, but ABC News had long since shuttered its Paris operation, just as Clipp’ Diner had permanently vanished from the Latin Quarter. This time, before boarding the Eurostar train to England, I arrived ridiculously early at the Gare du Nord and passed through more layers of security than I’d seen at the airport. That’s because during those intervening years, Paris, like my hometown of New York, had suffered from terrorist attacks that left the city with a lasting wound.

In his new memoir, Impossible City: Paris in the 21st Century, Simon Kuper provides a detailed profile of how the city set to host this summer’s Olympics has been transformed, both culturally and demographically, since the new millennium. The book describes his attempts to assimilate, as an English-speaking reporter for the Financial Times, since his move to Paris in the early 2000s.

Kuper offers anecdotes from daily life that are comical, frustrating, and relatable to English speakers—from viewers of Emily in Paris (2020– ) to ordinary tourists—as he has grappled with the French language and Parisians’ fastidious social codes. At the same time, Kuper has witnessed important historic changes to the city, including dark episodes such as the shootings at Charlie Hebdo magazine and the Bataclan concert hall, the devastating fire at Notre-Dame, and the pandemic lockdown—events he experienced as a parent, a neighborhood resident, and a journalist.

Kuper’s own background is important. As a Jewish Englishman of Dutch South African descent, and whose grandparents hail from Lithuania, he comes from “a family that had always taken a utilitarian view of nationality.” What brings him to Paris is not the typical enchantment that draws millions of pilgrims each year. Kuper is lured by the favorable exchange rate and still-affordable apartments, at least in comparison to the London housing market of the early 2000s. The Eurostar train under the English Channel made it possible for him to shuttle between capitals for work, though the effect of splitting time seems to forestall his adjustment to his new home.

Even as he disavows national loyalties, Kuper offers a standard English critique of France. He views Paris’s losing bid to London for the 2012 Olympics as a symbol of insularity and continued decline in an increasingly Anglophone world. Meanwhile, he is routinely tripped up and often exasperated by Parisian customs, from the arrogance of waiters and uncompromising attitude of his neighbors to the near-religious importance of long lunches. He attributes these behaviors to a proud country that still sees itself as the “Navel of the World.” And yet, in spite of all that confounds him, Kuper can’t help but admire what Parisians get right about quality of life. He praises their magnificent public spaces, their high standards for cuisine, and the value they place on dinner conversation, which Kuper says can “transport you to a higher realm.”

The idea of Paris as an “impossible city” hangs on a set of unruly challenges, also familiar to metropolises like New York or London. It is a city caught between modernism and age-old traditions, between growing forces of gentrification and a desire to keep Paris accessible for everyone. It is a place of luxury, well-connected bureaucrats, and bourgeois bohemians (a.k.a. “bobos,” the equivalent of hipsters), who thrive amid a backdrop of distressed suburbs, an ever-rising immigrant population, and the visibly impoverished outdoor food banks.

Though Kuper is one in a long tradition of expat journalists making these observations, this book is not a retread of Ernest Hemingway or Adam Gopnik. It’s a cross between memoir, reportage, and something akin to Paris for Dummies. The book is certainly informative as a sociological study and discourse on Parisian life. It enlightens us, with a sarcastic touch, on the importance of dress codes, the erratic habits of drivers, and the intriguing qualities of the political and cultural elite, including current president Emmanuel Macron.

However, the book feels most compelling when it puts us on the streets themselves and lets us mingle with the interesting figures who populate Kuper’s story. That includes a Muslim named Abdoulaye, a fellow parent from his kids’ soccer club whom Kuper forms a close friendship with; or a poor Guyanese refugee on his block who wins over the neighborhood with his charming intellect.

In his more personal narratives, Kuper comes across as thoughtful and candid, a man aware of his own flaws and willing to recount his embarrassing missteps. His references to his children are among the most touching. As the author languishes in his French, and in his slow acclimation as “an uptight northern European,” he watches his kids become “Frenchified” through day care and school, slipping easily into the habits of their environment. Though the family lives on the edge of a posh neighborhood, the kids attend economically mixed schools and join suburban sports clubs that are ethnically and religiously diverse.

Following a series of terrorist attacks in 2015–16, we see the greatest intersection of Kuper’s personal and professional lives. After the magazine Charlie Hebdo published caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed, two gunmen sought reprisal by killing 12 people and injuring 11 at the magazine’s offices. Kuper reflects afterward, with poignant dismay: “How do you tell your kids that afternoon football practice is cancelled because a dozen people who work in the same profession as you have been gunned down around the corner from your apartment?”

Only a few months later, two more terrorist attacks would hit close to home. One was an explosion by suicide bombers outside the Stade de France, where Kuper was watching the French national soccer team play Germany. At roughly the same moment, the slaughter of 130 people was taking place in and around the Bataclan concert hall. Those events fueled hatred and Islamophobia in many quarters, but they also inspired remarkable acts of unity. The night after the Bataclan killings, Kuper observed an “almost miraculous spectacle” of Parisians congregating outside the venue, among which he sees a “group of Orthodox Jewish men in skullcaps […] chatting with two bearded Muslims about kosher food and chapters in the Koran.” Sounding that same tone of optimism, Kuper describes his kids’ return to soccer practice after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, where he watches from the sidelines as children “of all three Abrahamic religions play football as if it were the most important thing in the world.”

Though the above scene takes place outside the borders of Paris, Kuper still refers to it as a “living tableau of the multicultural city.” Long walled off by the Périphérique, an eight-lane beltway that surrounds Paris, these ethnically dense suburbs have remained places of unrest. Kuper sees those walls finally starting to come down. He discusses the multibillion-euro project called “Grand Paris,” a plan to unify the city with these excluded areas through new train lines while also improving their standard of living through better housing and schools. Kuper looks again to the Olympics as an indication of France’s standing on the world stage. This time, by contrast, he applauds their successful 2024 campaign as an embodiment of the country’s progressive mindset and an embrace of multiculturalism. Most notably, he commends the French for making those formerly neglected suburbs the home of the Olympic Village.

In my return to Paris last year, I felt that old tenderness immediately renewed. I stayed in an Airbnb near the Canal Saint-Martin, a neighborhood made for long strolls in a city as strikingly beautiful as ever. And yet I couldn’t help but notice how remarkably transformed it was. Rather than take the subway to go further afield, I now used their bike-sharing program Vélib’ to get around. On my laptop, I used free wi-fi at a slew of cafés, many of them quirky, alternative coffee shops like the kind I frequented in New York. At the corner bakery, I bought chocolate croissants and fresh baguettes with a quick tap of my credit card, rather than digging in my pocket for change.

Such experiences are broadly echoed in Kuper’s memoir, which describes a city leaning forward into the 21st century while still maintaining many of its best traditions. The modern Paris, straddling old and new, is the perfect place to celebrate diverse Olympic athletes from around the world—or, if you’re one of those Parisians with better things to do, to ignore them entirely.

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