the city

french writers have an obsession with the city of paris (and filmmakers alike: truffaut). they go into lengthy accounts of the city's streets seemingly so as to flaunt their profond knowledge of the city's every main artery as well as obscur back alley way. for a balzac this might be of immediately as forming part of his realist project. yet even then we think immediately of the pension in le père goriot, and the absurdly steep hills that lead to the pension which make it impossible for horse carriages to descend the street on which it sits. the pension and the streets which surround it are completely fictional. we see the same thing in les misérables: we remember cosette and valjean's desperate escape from javert. in one moment they make their way through actual, verifiable parisian streets only to stubble into hugo's purely imagined quartier. hugo and balzac, for all their apparent attempts to cultivate a real world, finally show themselves to understand profoundly that their characters need a land of fiction to escape the world and its knowledge of the city. or perhaps more importantly, the world's love of paris.

is it simply for this reason that it would be absurd to attempt this in any other context? only the grand metropolises might succeed in attempting to replicate something of the french's obsession with mapping out their number one city. new york, london. would a tokyo work? a sydney? and how would someone familiar with these cities understand a fictional hole dug in the city? as a way to provide shelter for the characters of the novel? surely not. it would more likely be viewed as pompous, or trendy, or just plainly ridiculous and worthless since on one outside of this city would know the reference. imagine a detailed examination of street names in a novel set in cairns.

but is the author’s motive ever really to ‘examine’ the streets concerned?

P.S
in a purely parisian context, all of this is very interesting to remark given the detailed mapping of cities that certain websites have performed. take mappy.fr for example. not only are streets searchable, but you can also see buildings' facades and the view looking down the centre of the street.