João B. Ventura will present his book "O Flâneur de Paris" on September 26 at the Maison du Portugal – André de Gouveia, part of the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris. The session features interventions by José Manuel Esteves and Gonçalo Cordeiro, faculty members and researchers at the institution, and includes musical moments with the accordion of Algarve musician Gonçalo Pescada, who will recreate the Parisian and Lusophone musical atmosphere with reinterpretations of works by Édith Piaf, Jacques Brel, José Afonso, Carlos Paredes, Ferrer Trindade and Richard Galliano.
The presentation carries strong symbolic and affective value, as João Ventura, a former resident of the institution, returns to celebrate the very city to which he pays tribute in the book. The work is described as an intimate literary atlas and an affective geography, where places illuminate like memories and street names evoke writers, films, songs and ghosts.
The book transposes the physical space of Paris to become a literary palimpsest — the city of Baudelaire, Benjamin, Aragon, Hemingway, Queneau, Perec, Cortázar, Roubaud and Vila-Matas. According to editor and writer Dinis H. Machado, the work achieves a rare balance between personal memory, literary criticism and poetic cartography, described as an invitation to literary wandering to learn to look anew at what was always there.
The presentation is partnered with the Cátedra Lindley Cintra of Université Paris Nanterre and the Portuguese Language and Culture Readership of Université Paris VIII, from Camões – Instituto da Cooperação e da Língua, and was published by The Poets and Dragons Society.
