Paris posers

I meant to take Penguin's reprint of Julian Green's Paris with me to the French capital but, in a moment worthy of Geoff Dyer in Out of Sheer Rage, forgot it at home. So I visited Green's impressions of the city of his birth while on the London Underground instead.

Like the author on his return to the USA during World War II, 'It was a Paris of visions in which I took my walks now, a Paris that, though intensely real, was imperceptibly migrating from flesh to spirit.' In her idiosyncratic yet incisive introduction, Lila Azam Zanganeh rightly challenges Green's nostalgia and even his tendency to exclude others from experiencing 'the Paris of the Parisians'.

In my favourite chapter, 'Museums, streets, seasons, faces', Green contends: 'The posers you could set, even for teachers, just by running through the history of our city (what happened to the mummies brought back from Egypt, where were they buried, what lies beneath the column on which the spirit of the Bastille is forever taking wing, where did they divert the Phantom of the Opera's underground lake, who posed for the statue of Pierre de Wissant, who lived in the château des Brouillards?), but in Paris you may always be sure there will be someone, secretly in love with his city, who will know all the answers.' That must be true of London nowadays, too.

(The answers to Green's posers can be found at the back of the Penguin Modern Classics Paris.)

Ceci n'est pas un blogpost

Berlin brought to book

In his latest pre-WWII thriller, Mission to Paris, author Alan Furst's film star hero, Fredric Stahl, briefly checks into Berlin's Hotel Adlon. It seems an intrusion into the territory of another wartime character: Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther, who becomes the hotel's house detective in If the Dead Rise Not (2009).

Just over 80 years ago, the city was the setting for another detective, a child: Emil Tischbein. In Emil and the Detectives (1931), Erich Kästner's plucky hero teams up with local kids to retrieve his stolen money after Emil takes the train to Berlin. Kästner is as careful in his description of the boys' attempts to recover the cash as he is in his portrayal of the city:

'The noise was indescribable, and on the pavements crowds of people kept hurrying by. Out of every turning vans and lorries, trams and double-decker buses swarmed into the main thoroughfare. There were newspaper stands at every corner, with men shouting the latest headlines. Wherever Emil looked there were gay shop windows filled with flowers and fruit, books, clothes, fine silk underwear, gold watches and clocks. And all the buildings stretched up and up into the sky. So this was Berlin!'

The chase leads the gang from Friedrichstrasse station, along Kaiserdamm, Trautenaustrasse, to Nollendorfplatz. In a sentiment that might be replicated by Hans Fallada, Emil initially believes, 'No one has time for other people's troubles in a city. They've all troubles enough of their own.'

Writing just one year after Emil..., in Little Man, What Now? Fallada has 'little man' Pinneberg trudge the city's streets in a pattern also recognisable from Alfred Döblin's earlier Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), which was adapted as a 15-and-a-half hour film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder in 1980. In the latter books it is not children who dominate the streets but the unemployed, hopeless and hucksters.

Pinneberg realises Berlin is not the place for him following an altercation with a policeman on Friedrichstrasse: 'Then Pinneberg went on his way, one step at a time, through Berlin. But nowhere was completely dark, and going past policemen was particularly difficult.'

Outsiders' London

Tate Britain's 'Another London' comes to an end this weekend. Subtitled 'International photographers capture city life 1930-1980', the show is a roll call of refugees fleeing the Nazis pre-World War II: Ellen Auerbach, Dorothy Bohm, Hans Casparius, Herbert List, Felix H Man...

Prime among them is Bill Brandt, born in Munich, and moved to London in 1933. The handful of his works chosen here, from the Eric and Louise Franck London Collection, are symptomatic of the exhibition as a whole: they're all exterior shots.

As if to underline the outsider status of these emigrés and visitors, the vast majority of the photos show familiar landmarks and everyday characters but rarely scratch beneath the city's surface. James Barnor's 'Mike Eghan at Piccadilly Circus, London' (c1967) is typical, and full of incidental information (posters in the background advertise Doctor Zhivago, Michael Caine in Funeral in Berlin and Lionel Bart's Oliver!, 'London's longest running musical'), although there is no explanation of who Mike Eghan is, unless I missed it.

Ghanaian Barnor (Eghan is a compatriot broadcaster) has one of the few indoor shots on show - 'Flamingo cover girl Sarah with friend, London' (c1965) - and how atmospheric it is: we all know these stairwells of shared accommodation. Eve Arnold goes one step further and invades the bathroom for 'One of four girls who share a flat in Knightsbridge' (1961). Along with Willy Ronis' 1955 interior of a barely changed French House, these are the exhibition's best images.

I've always been troubled by Bill Brandt's latent sadism, but how I longed for one of his nudes - 'The Policeman's Daughter, Hampstead' (1945), say, or 'Eaton Place Nude' (1951). The Eaton Place images are unforgettable to anyone who has ever visited any of the central London townhouses, while the former hints at the perversions perpetrated behind our close doors.

And if not these, why not his 'Late night coffee stall' (1939), 'Alice at the Crooked Billet' (1939), 'Young woman at Charlie Brown's' (1946) or Brandt's 1941 portrait of Dylan Thomas in the Salisbury pub. In his work, perhaps more than in any of the images on show, the German was someone who never lost his outsider's eye, but was part of British life, exactly as he wanted.

Snapping up the Munch bunch

Almost 20 years after the last major Edvard Munch retrospective in London - at the National Gallery - the Norwegian artist is being celebrated at Tate Modern until 14 October. The National Gallery show was based on the Frieze of Life series and the Tate exhibition also emphasises the cycles in Munch's work, more successfully than for Gerhard Richter in its recent blockbuster.

The emphasis does shift between the National Gallery and Tate shows, and not just because the former included a version of The Scream - notably from the figure of Tulla Larsen, with whom Munch had a relationship from 1899 to 1902, to Rosa Meissner, a model who came from Berlin in 1907, along with her sister, Olga. And while the exhibition at the National Gallery was preoccupied with an incident in which Munch accidentally shot himself after an argument with Tulla (presumably the source of the X-ray of a bullet in Munch's hand, which goes unexplained at the Tate), the Tate survey concentrates on an incident at a party when the artist threatened to shoot a younger artist, Ludvig Karsten.

While the National Gallery catalogue contains contemporary photographs of Munch's exhibitions, the Tate makes much more of the artist's photographs, in line with the current vogue. The main exhibit could be said to be a photograph of Rosa Meissner naked in a room, which inspired the series Weeping Woman. (Interested in auras and spiritualism - as well as blurs and odd angles - Munch creates a spooky shadow in the photo, reminiscent of Francesca Woodman's self-portraits, although the spectre is Rosa's sister, Olga.)

'Edvard Munch belongs to a generation of artists - that of Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, Félix Vallotton... and others - all born around 1860, who achieved their first stylistic maturity in the final two decades of the nineteenth century, at the time of the great boom in amateur photography,' writes Clément Chéroux in the Tate catalogue. This overlaps with a recent exhibition, 'Snapshot: Painters and Photography, Bonnard to Vuillard', whose companion published by Easton is well worth snapping up, however: 'What fundamentally distinguishes Munch from the other painters who practised photography at the same time is the quantity of self-portraits he produced.'

Many of them are included in this exhibition; they form a sort of autobiography. While he painted himself with deliberation in such wonderful works as Between the Clock and the Bed (1940-3) - one of my favourite self-portraits of any artist - in these snaps he seems to have been looking for answers to questions he didn't know how to pose.

Though the National Gallery may have presented visitors with the broader survey of Munch's work, this great show at Tate Modern has touches of Paul Gauguin, 'who Munch considered to be the greatest artist of his time' (Arne Eggum in the Tate catalogue) - see Red Virginia Creeper (1898-1900) - and Vallotton (check out the shapes in The Kiss, 1897, or the figures in the doorway of Jealousy, 1907, inspired by Munch's unhappy relationship with Tulla Larsen). His influence can even be found, more recently, in the work of another wonderful storyteller: Peter Doig - compare Ashes and Summer Night's Dream: The Voice with Doig's Echo Lake (1998) and 100 Years Ago (Carrera), 2001.

Portraits of the artists

Michel Houellebecq's latest novel, The Map and the Territory - recently out in paperback - is a neat spin on that favourite of novelists, filmmakers and, indeed, artists: a portrait of the artist. Houellebecq's work, which varies wildly in tone (translator Gavin Boyd is masochistically faithful to the original French), has an artist invade the life of a reclusive writer - Houellebecq himself.

The author is gloriously unflattering about his subject. The 'author of Platform' - the book apes the language of Wikipedia or even technical manuals - is discovered as a reticent recluse, gasping for a drink, spouting non-sequiturs. 'He stank a little, but less than a corpse...' '"I've relapsed,"' he tells his visitor, '"I've completely relapsed into charcuterie."'

It made me return to one of my favourite pen portraits of an artist: W Somerset Maugham's fictional take on the life of Paul Gauguin, The Moon and Sixpence (1919). Maugham's novel is just as reflexive as The Map... as it is told by another writer, an acquaintance of the subject, Charles Strickland (the fictive Gauguin).

Maugham reflects on the narrator's early days as a writer in a manner that seems little changed: 'Then it was a distinction to be under forty, but now to be more than twenty-five is absurd.' Although the venues may have returned to type: 'Chelsea and Bloomsbury have taken the place of Hampstead, Notting Hill Gate, and High Street, Kensington.'

Nor is Maugham any less sharp than Houellebecq: 'Mrs Strickland had the gift of sympathy. It is a charming faculty, but one often abused by those who are conscious of its possession: for there is something ghoulish in the avidity with which they will pounce upon the misfortune of their friends so that they may exercise their dexterity. It gushes forth like an oil-well... There are bosoms on which so many tears have been shed that I cannot bedew them with mine.'

And, later: 'I had not yet learnt how contradictory human nature is; I did not know how much pose there is in the sincere, how much baseness in the noble, or how much goodness in the reprobate.'

W Somerset Maugham's 1928 play The Sacred Flame is at the Rose Theatre in Kingston, 13-22 September.

Thomson wins

Bloomsbury has just republished all eight of Rupert Thomson's novels. It's a brave move for a strangely undercelebrated writer. Perhaps his publisher's vote of confidence and the lack of attention Thomson seems to attract are due to his almost old-fashioned dedication to novel writing. These are chunky, thoughtful works, that perhaps only went slightly off course mid-career, with marketing-inspired Soft (1998) and The Book of Revelation (1999), which was made into a film with Greta Scacchi in 2006.

Thomson first came to attention in 1987 with Dreams of Leaving, his vision of a police-run village, New Egypt.  There followed a terrific run - The Five Gates of Hell (1991) and Air & Fire (1993) - before probably my favourite work of his: The Insult (1996). It's a tremendous celebration of imagination: a blind man goes in search of the invisible man, who's disappeared!

I've written before about how his Divided Kingdom (2005) reflected my emotional history growing up, while Thomson's most recent work - The Party's Got to Stop (published by Granta), is a retelling of his own relationship with his brothers. Like Geoff Dyer, Thomson is in part inspired by living in different places - The Book of Revelation grew out of a stint in Amsterdam and more recently he moved to Barcelona. The Book was also reflected in his last novel, Death of a Murderer (2007), inspired by Myra Hindley, which he told me was another work about 'a man in a room'.

Nine books isn't a bad return over 25 years. His next, Secrecy - a historical novel set in Florence - is due next spring and I can't wait.