This is kind of like Richard McGuire's Here in that rather than tell the story of a person (or zoomorph), the only real chacter is a location. While in Here, McGuire's camera was trained on the space of a single room, in 750 Years In Paris, Mahé is focused on about 25 meters of real estate in Paris. The book begins in 1265 and each page turn looks at the same space through time; one page might forward time by a year or two, another by 80 years. We watch a building raise, grow, languish, and collapse (in whole or in part) and then we watch the process again. We see the citizenry before, in, and about the edifice in times of joy and famine and war and cultural revolution. This is narrowly, the story of this building and, broadly, the story of Paris and its people.

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