Less is Lost by Andrew Sean Greer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I loved ‘Less’ so much that I guess four stars is a fall from five. I wasn’t opposed to a sequel to ‘Less’ but what would it bring to be new, to be engaging? I love Greer’s writing, and find it both immensely readable and at times, simply beautiful. I didn’t find the American adventures quite as compelling as his international ones. There were some fun parts that made me laugh, but I suppose I wasn’t charmed in the same way as being freshly introduced to Arthur Less. The other thing is that I loved (and was surprised) by the mystery of the narrator of the first book; losing this tension felt a bit unsatisfying. My husband hated how the narrator announced too often, ‘I’m Freddy Pelu!’ whereas I found that there were a number of odd descriptions of the race of a character, a sense that Greer wants to do right and be correct about writing in these fraught times but isn’t quite sure how to do so. One description, of an old, Black woman made me think that ‘old’ and ‘Black’ was possibly the least interesting way to say something about someone. Still, I love that Greer wrote a comic novel that was taken seriously as literature, that he was celebrated for it, and that he portrayed gay aging in a way so poignant, relatable and funny, and that goodwill carried over to reading ‘Less is Lost’.
My favourite thing to do in Paris is to ride around on a Vélib, the almost free biking system. I wondered how much it had changed in seven years, as I’d heard a lot had changed. New operators. Competition from other bike schemes, more chaotically organised where people leave the bikes in random places. Electric scooters too, which I’m too afraid to try. And e-bikes. The current Vélib system has e-bikes.
a ‘découverte’ card. It was only EUR 5 and required photos to stick to the card. Why hadn’t I brought those extra photos I kept for just such an occasion? There are actually photo booths all over Paris, and the train stations, so I made some photos for EUR 10, went and bought the proper card from the fellow (who sort of indicated, ‘oh, that’s what you wanted’) and then discovered that you really don’t need the photos on the card, and the photo doesn’t fit in any case. I cut it down to size and stuck in on anyways.
But sorry for all these details. The experience on the bikes was as good as ever. There are more bike paths than I remember, many of them wide, and busy with cyclists (and some scooters). What surprised me was that with so many Vélibs in use at all times, the biggest problem was not finding a Vélib but finding an empty spot to put the Vélibs back at the stations. Even though they seem to have a new system where you can put a Vélib back in a station when it’s full, by locking itself to something else, the one time I needed to try it, I couldn’t figure it out.
It was exhilarating and terrifying as you are often in busy traffic and super close to the cars. But the thing is, Parisian drivers seem to be use to all this chaos, and there are so many other bikes on the road. So, you just try your best, and cars move around you, and you around cars. The only time I saw people raise their voices was to prevent accidents, when a pedestrian or car or bike were really too close and about to collide.
took me five days before a young colleague told me she’d had the same problem and you have to press ‘3’ on the dashboard to give it some juice, otherwise it stays in ‘1’. I only got to try a proper ebike once after that. Strangely, it was on a bike that someone had left at a station unlocked and still running (on their account), but they’d already set it on ‘3’ and what a difference it made. It was fast and quite fun.
A few of the uses may be regional; I wasn’t familiar with them, e.g. round parentheses to ‘indicate optional words that imply some doubt’ as in the sentence (directed at a police officer), ‘Listen mate (Bobby), you do not want to mess with me.’