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New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writings from the City
For two decades Npr commentator Andrei Codrescu has been living in and writing about his adopted city, where, as he puts it, the official language is dreams. How apt that a refugee born in Transylvania found his home in a place where vampires roam the streets and voodoo queens live around the corner; where cemeteries are the most popular picnic spots, the ghosts of poets, prostitutes, and pirates are palpable, and in the French Quarter, no one ever sleeps. Codrescu's essays have been called "satirical gems," "subversive," "sardonic and stunning," "funny," "gonzo," "wittily poignant," and "perverse"-here is a writer who perfectly mirrors the wild, voluptuous, bohemian character of New Orleans itself. This retrospective follows him from newcomer to near first seduced by the lush banana trees in his backyard and the sensual aroma of coffee at the café down the block, Codrescu soon becomes a Window Gang regular at the infamous bar Molly's on Decatur, does a stint as King of Krewe de Vieux Carré at Mardi Gras, befriends artists, musicians, and eccentrics, and exposes the city's underbelly of corruption, warning presciently about the lack of planning for floods in a city high on its own insouciance. Alas, as we all now know, Paradise is lost.New Orleans, Mon Amour is an epic love song, a clear-eyed elegy, a cultural celebration, and a thank-you note to New Orleans in its Golden Age.
288 pages, Paperback
First published January 31, 2001
About the author
Andrei Codrescu
142 books141 followersAndrei Codrescu is a poet, novelist, essayist, and NPR commentator. His many books include Whatever Gets You through the Night, The Postmodern Dada Guide, and The Poetry Lesson. He was Mac Curdy Distinguished Professor of English at Louisiana State University from 1984 until his retirement in 2009.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 103 reviews
June 12, 2011
My fondness for New Orleans is great. I lived in southeast Louisiana for six years in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and I visited the Crescent City, ate at its great restaurants, and listened to its music many times. Despite moving away from the state in 1981, I almost yearly visit my mother, brother, and sister in Baton Rouge with side trips to New Orleans, an hour away.
Thus I looked forward to reading the impressions of the city by the Romanian-born writer and NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu from 1985 to post-Katrina. I tremendously enjoyed this compilation of short and long essays on the city. I especially liked the longer pieces; the two-page transcriptions from his NPR commentaries were a little too slight.
His descriptions and observations are acute. This about the above-ground cemeteries: "New Orleans cemeteries look like vast bakeries quietly holding the ancestral loaves." On Louisiana's relentless hot and humid summers: "The first summer I spent here, in 1985, I was sure that my brains were boiling, and it it weren't for the cool barrooms where I scribbled nonsense, I would have surely evaporated."
In the late 1980s, Codrescu went from being in the crowd during a Mardi Gras parade to being on a float with the Mystic Korpse of Komatose, part of the Krewe de Vieux Carre. He describes throwing beads, doubloons, and medallions to carnival crowds in the French Quarter but running out of throwaways before the conclusion of the parade.
Codrescu does not present merely a Tourist Bureau view of New Orleans. He writes about the high crime rate, the corruption of its city government and especially of its police department, and the prejudices and gun-toting of many of its residents. He criticizes the city government and its residents for their failures to prepare the city adequately for a major hurricane.
But he also affectionately describes the city's many virtues, its "exaltation of the flesh," and being a unique city in the United States: "It's an environment for a specific life-form, a dreamy, lazy, sentimental, musical one, prey to hallucinations (not visions), tolerant, indolent, and gifted at storytelling. This goes against the very grain of American civilization as we know it. We lie incongruously in the way of the thrifty, Puritan America ..."
For someone who is familiar with New Orleans, these essays will bring back memories and recognition. For those unlucky few who have never been there, this book may finally push them to go.
Thus I looked forward to reading the impressions of the city by the Romanian-born writer and NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu from 1985 to post-Katrina. I tremendously enjoyed this compilation of short and long essays on the city. I especially liked the longer pieces; the two-page transcriptions from his NPR commentaries were a little too slight.
His descriptions and observations are acute. This about the above-ground cemeteries: "New Orleans cemeteries look like vast bakeries quietly holding the ancestral loaves." On Louisiana's relentless hot and humid summers: "The first summer I spent here, in 1985, I was sure that my brains were boiling, and it it weren't for the cool barrooms where I scribbled nonsense, I would have surely evaporated."
In the late 1980s, Codrescu went from being in the crowd during a Mardi Gras parade to being on a float with the Mystic Korpse of Komatose, part of the Krewe de Vieux Carre. He describes throwing beads, doubloons, and medallions to carnival crowds in the French Quarter but running out of throwaways before the conclusion of the parade.
Codrescu does not present merely a Tourist Bureau view of New Orleans. He writes about the high crime rate, the corruption of its city government and especially of its police department, and the prejudices and gun-toting of many of its residents. He criticizes the city government and its residents for their failures to prepare the city adequately for a major hurricane.
But he also affectionately describes the city's many virtues, its "exaltation of the flesh," and being a unique city in the United States: "It's an environment for a specific life-form, a dreamy, lazy, sentimental, musical one, prey to hallucinations (not visions), tolerant, indolent, and gifted at storytelling. This goes against the very grain of American civilization as we know it. We lie incongruously in the way of the thrifty, Puritan America ..."
For someone who is familiar with New Orleans, these essays will bring back memories and recognition. For those unlucky few who have never been there, this book may finally push them to go.
April 23, 2021
I'd never heard of Andrei Codrescu before, but he's originally from Romania and has written for the BBC, as well as many books of poetry and journalism. Or rather, if this book is an indication, I would say that he writes poetry, and...essentially, poetry. Which is fine, it's just that I wouldn't classify most of this book as journalism- more like wry, poetic observation about New Orleans and its people. Anyway, Codrescu immigrated to the US in the 60s, apparently hung out with the Beats a little, and has been living for decades in The Crescent City. Cool. The pieces in this collection date back to '85, and while these early pieces are very short (mostly only a page long) and insubstantial, I enjoyed them- I felt like I was reading a fun and breezy zine about a city that, I sometimes forget, actually existed before Katrina. I worked there for a few months with Americorps in 2010, and these pieces brought back a lot of elements I associate with the place- heat, humidity, tropical depressions, fried food, gothic writing, French street names, frequent conversations about hurricanes, cemeteries where the dead are entombed above ground, and the kinds of cockroaches that, to paraphrase David Foster Wallace, instead of scurrying for the shadows as soon as you turn on the light, look up at you like "yo, you got a problem?"
I picked up some interesting facts while reading. Who would have known, for example, that in the mid-nineteenth century, the city supported two German-language newspapers, and that a German immigrant by the name of Baron Ludwig Von Reizenstein serialized a story called The Mysteries of New Orleans that sounds like it was pretty wild for its day?
He described...lesbian and homosexual love. He was...a rogue who loved shocking his readers with the sexual shenanigans of the city, a reformer who vividly described a profound corruption that's still, alas, part of the city's fabric. His contemporary readers doubtless recognized their city, and because of it, they stayed when Reizenstein abruptly took them into a world of magic and horror that had its source in the yellow fever epidemic and introduced characters with superhuman powers.
Codrescu keeps returning to this idea that Louisiana, and New Orleans in particular, is its own thing, distinct from the rest of the country. There was a lot of this kind of talk, post-Katrina, when the images of the city underwater looked so surreal; but even in the decades before that, there was apparently no shortage of problems. Codrescu describes a murder-rate that spiked in the early 90s, the mysterious disappearance of Ylenia Carrisi, poverty, corruption, and the fact that they live, as Codrescu puts it, "...in a bowl surrounded by levees. If they break, the bowl fills up, and that's the end of us." In addition,
our multiply indicted governor is a symbol of the age just past: a charming, loudmouth megalomaniac with instant solutions to everything. While the legislature is talking about a 20 percent across-the-board cut in education spending- and this in a state that already has the most bankrupt education system in the country- the governor talks gambling as the cure to all evils, and the Church recommends new sin taxes on cigarettes and liquor instead...the locals imagine that they can weather anything if only no one bothers them to take part in the political process. Years of corruption and neglect have made cynics of them all...
On the other hand, Codrescu also sees New Orleans, perhaps slightly romantically, as a place that embraces inertia, indolence and humidity-induced stupor- all part of the spirit of life in The Big Easy- and as a refuge from the Puritan work ethic that characterizes the rest of the country.
Still, I often got the feeling that Codrescu was describing his own relatively fortunate bohemian lifestyle, and not venturing far beyond that, except in a sort of detached way. Eh. That isn't a crime, but it doesn't tend to make for a complete picture of any city, either. I'm not sure that every New Orleanian would agree with the impression he sometimes leaves the reader with, that the city is a poetic, Dionysian revelry 24/7. In fact, I know they wouldn't- when I lived there, I probably worked physically harder than I ever have in my life, and I wasn't the only one. Furthermore, something as simple as a trip to the NOLA Mission, or a chat with some of the guys waiting to be picked up for low-wage day labor outside one of the Home Depots at 7 in the morning, might have allowed for a broader and more nuanced picture of the city, or gotten the author out of his comfort zone at least. By the end, Codrescu was starting to grate on me.
But at the same time, it is kind of refreshing to hear someone talk about pumping the brakes on the pursuit of neoliberal utopia and just trying to enjoy life, music and fried food in an uncomplicated way. And the book definitely captures something of the spirit of the place, for those of us who aren't sure we'll ever get there, or get back there, before the waters take it.
June 19, 2010
Even though I grew up in Louisiana and lived most of my life there, I never really had any love for or desire to visit New Orleans. For the first time, I've read a book that makes me think I might have been missing out. However, it should be noted that Andrei Codrescu (LA's Transylvanian poet-in-residence & NPR commentator) has the luxury of living the Bohemian life, at least according to his writing. If I had ever moved to New Orleans, I have no doubt that I would have spent most of my time bussing tables and cleaning up the vomit and other bodily fluids of aforementioned Bohemians.
New Orleans, Mon Amour is a collection of Codrescu's essays on the city from the twenty years up to, and including, Katrina. The essays do get a little repetitive after a while, but they give an interesting perspective from a person who is (at least at first) an outsider, but never a tourist. Codrescu celebrates the life, food, music, culture, and ghosts of New Orleans without letting you forget about the crime, corruption, and poverty from which it all sprung.
New Orleans, Mon Amour is a collection of Codrescu's essays on the city from the twenty years up to, and including, Katrina. The essays do get a little repetitive after a while, but they give an interesting perspective from a person who is (at least at first) an outsider, but never a tourist. Codrescu celebrates the life, food, music, culture, and ghosts of New Orleans without letting you forget about the crime, corruption, and poverty from which it all sprung.
March 15, 2012
Since I was heading to Nola for Mardi Gras I wanted to read something topical about the city. New Orleans, Mon Amour, was written by fellow Romanian and poet Andrei Codrescu, and is a compilation of all the writing he has done over the years about his adopted home. The longer essays were excellent. Through entertaining anecdotes and poetic prose Codrescu provides a surrealist picture of a surreal city. The stories seem too wild to be true, but after being there, I realized that nothing is too wild to be true in New Orleans.
The problem with the book was that the majority of it was one or two page non-sequiters that are loosely about the city. Taken individually each of these is highly readable and poignant, but as part of a compilation they tended to drag and repeat.
The problem with the book was that the majority of it was one or two page non-sequiters that are loosely about the city. Taken individually each of these is highly readable and poignant, but as part of a compilation they tended to drag and repeat.
March 19, 2011
This book is the best description of New Orleans that I have ever found. If you know New Orleans, every word of this will ring true. If you do not know New Orleans - this might help - but you may think Codrescu is making things up or exagerating - which he is not. It is perfect that a poet should write about New Orleans - becuase mere prose cannot do justice to this amazing, mess of a city. (This is not s book of poetry - but his turn of phrase is so beuatiful and spot on time and again.) It will make you laugh, break your heart for what has been so broken by Katrina, and make you desparately wish you were there. Makes me wonder why I ever left - - oh yeah - because it is a crazy place - but still my favorite spot on the planet.
Read
June 17, 2014I'm an eternal enthusiast for both belles-lettres and sultry tropical ports, so this was a natural shoe-in for me. Granted, there are a lot of repeated ideas and themes (as one expects from a collection of several decades of material), and more than a few lazy New Orleans cliches (good god, I never want to here the words "voodoo" or "gumbo" again), but there is enough great prose for Codrescu to more or less break even in my book.
January 26, 2018
I highly recommend that you go to New Orleans. But if you can't, just read this book. Actually, even if you CAN go to New Orleans, read this book anyway. That's how I read it - while I was traveling to NOLA. And, boy, was Codrescu right about "synchronicity" - it felt like every time I read about something in the book, I'd encounter it in some way in real life. Like every thing in NOLA is somehow aligned.
Or as Codrescu puts it...
"With varying degrees of skill, dozens of writers have stumbled on the same secrets or mysteries of New Orleans, on the vibrational reality that lies like gossamer over its physical features and permeates even the most casual visitor with a strange sense of something invisible."
Or as Codrescu puts it...
"With varying degrees of skill, dozens of writers have stumbled on the same secrets or mysteries of New Orleans, on the vibrational reality that lies like gossamer over its physical features and permeates even the most casual visitor with a strange sense of something invisible."
December 24, 2021
Really great collection of essays. I like this author’s style.
August 27, 2015
I first heard Andrei Codrescu on NPR reciting his poetry and essays in his lovely thick eastern European accent. If you love New Orleans or think you will love it, you will love viewing the city through the eyes of this self described bohemian poet from Transylvania, Romania.
The city can drive a sober minded person insane, but it feeds the dreamer.
A poet's love story to his adopted home, at times it is laugh out loud funny, at times moving, and at times brutally honest all delivered with his customary dry wit. Particularly poignant on this 10 year anniversary, the last few chapters are essays devoted to Katrina and its aftermath. If I ever get to New Orleans I plan to sit myself down in one of those cafe/bars beignet and espresso/martini in hand hoping Mr. Codrescu will drop by.
The city can drive a sober minded person insane, but it feeds the dreamer.
A poet's love story to his adopted home, at times it is laugh out loud funny, at times moving, and at times brutally honest all delivered with his customary dry wit. Particularly poignant on this 10 year anniversary, the last few chapters are essays devoted to Katrina and its aftermath. If I ever get to New Orleans I plan to sit myself down in one of those cafe/bars beignet and espresso/martini in hand hoping Mr. Codrescu will drop by.
June 1, 2007
Andrei lives here not only because he loves it here, but because he belongs here. He once told me that the great tragedy of his life was that he could not hire a "scribe" to follow him around and record his life for him, so that one part of him always had to remain separate from his actions so that he could record it later.
Reading this book is a lot like having the privilege of Andrei Codrescu as your personal scribe whilst you shamble through life in the quarter; it's messy, dirty, literate and slightly drunk with love (and other stuff) - it reminds me why nowhere else will ever be home again.
Reading this book is a lot like having the privilege of Andrei Codrescu as your personal scribe whilst you shamble through life in the quarter; it's messy, dirty, literate and slightly drunk with love (and other stuff) - it reminds me why nowhere else will ever be home again.
September 6, 2010
Beautiful writing, but towards the end Codrescu bordered on elitism. I get that New Orleans has a rich culture all its own, but Codrescu treated New Orleans as the greatest place on earth and anyone who doesn't live there is seen as a boring, uncultured zombie.
September 9, 2020
This is how you write non-fiction that is actually good. Love this author. And I must reread this in New Orleans.
April 28, 2023
A delight!
Codrescu could never be considered an "ambassador" for New Orleans, not in the literal definition of the word. He's too honest for that kind of politicking. But he is one of its most vocal, verbose cheerleaders and fiercest critics. All out of love, but he takes a firm stance in not painting over the dog-sized cockroaches.
Foregrounding those problems, though, is what the enemies of New Orleans would do, and an enemy of New Orleans is an enemy of mine.
Over 25~ years, he paints a vivacious picture of the poet grottos and cycles of carnival that sweep the city up. He understands the rhythms of the city as only a local (rules about your grandmaw's maw be dammed, Codrescu's a local) can. This is the most honest thing about the city that I've ever read, and it's not a coincidence that it's among the most beautiful. A lot of writing about New Orleans tends to get high on its own supply and comes off as a commercial. Thankfully, not an issue here.
This is not a tourist brochure unless you want to tour thoughtfully (in which case, I think you graduate past the title of "tourist" and can consider yourself an adventurer). Take the city in context, the good and the bad. Learn its dark histories and its inspiring ones. Lament in how more than half of all white people in the city voted for a S-tier bigot in David Duke and its towering achievements in police corruption and brutality; gawk in the joy of all-night parties with their generous bartenders and firebrand artists.
Codrescu's writing is the only other writer to *really* remind me of Tom Robbins, my all-time favorite stylist, for more than brief flashes. It was a joy to listen to someone speak in this meter for this long. This is a collection of writing for NPR spanning multiple decades, not a thoughtfully composed, internally conscious volume. Repetition is unavoidable, but I'm more than willing to look past it.
My advice: buy this book. Read an essay a day. On the final day, get on a plane that drops you off at Louis Armstrong International. The rest will sort itself out.
Codrescu could never be considered an "ambassador" for New Orleans, not in the literal definition of the word. He's too honest for that kind of politicking. But he is one of its most vocal, verbose cheerleaders and fiercest critics. All out of love, but he takes a firm stance in not painting over the dog-sized cockroaches.
Foregrounding those problems, though, is what the enemies of New Orleans would do, and an enemy of New Orleans is an enemy of mine.
Over 25~ years, he paints a vivacious picture of the poet grottos and cycles of carnival that sweep the city up. He understands the rhythms of the city as only a local (rules about your grandmaw's maw be dammed, Codrescu's a local) can. This is the most honest thing about the city that I've ever read, and it's not a coincidence that it's among the most beautiful. A lot of writing about New Orleans tends to get high on its own supply and comes off as a commercial. Thankfully, not an issue here.
This is not a tourist brochure unless you want to tour thoughtfully (in which case, I think you graduate past the title of "tourist" and can consider yourself an adventurer). Take the city in context, the good and the bad. Learn its dark histories and its inspiring ones. Lament in how more than half of all white people in the city voted for a S-tier bigot in David Duke and its towering achievements in police corruption and brutality; gawk in the joy of all-night parties with their generous bartenders and firebrand artists.
Codrescu's writing is the only other writer to *really* remind me of Tom Robbins, my all-time favorite stylist, for more than brief flashes. It was a joy to listen to someone speak in this meter for this long. This is a collection of writing for NPR spanning multiple decades, not a thoughtfully composed, internally conscious volume. Repetition is unavoidable, but I'm more than willing to look past it.
My advice: buy this book. Read an essay a day. On the final day, get on a plane that drops you off at Louis Armstrong International. The rest will sort itself out.
April 7, 2024
This lush, poetic, chortling book is a collection of short articles and essays on New Orleans, from a newcomer who became a local and loved it with all the fierceness of an infatuation that settles over long time into a married kind of love that appreciates the flaws while still appreciating the beauties.
Codrescu has many keen insights in here, and over and over as I read, I kept wondering if he ever moved back to the city after the flood. It will be rebuilt, he wrote, but it will never be the same city we loved. It isn't, but at the same time, it so is. Even in the face of intense gentrification and with the bulls eye target of the worst climate change effects pasted directly on its forehead, New Orleans in its new iteration is startlingly, indeterminately, still itself.
It was incredibly thirst-quenching to read a book about this place penned a talented author who loves it as much as I do.
Codrescu has many keen insights in here, and over and over as I read, I kept wondering if he ever moved back to the city after the flood. It will be rebuilt, he wrote, but it will never be the same city we loved. It isn't, but at the same time, it so is. Even in the face of intense gentrification and with the bulls eye target of the worst climate change effects pasted directly on its forehead, New Orleans in its new iteration is startlingly, indeterminately, still itself.
It was incredibly thirst-quenching to read a book about this place penned a talented author who loves it as much as I do.
November 1, 2016
I miss hearing Andrei Codrescu on NPR, so I was delighted to find this book at the library when I was searching for books on New Orleans. (I've got a trip there in December) Finishing it today, while at a dental lab (don't ask - long story) almost spoiled my enjoyment of the book. Reading with background noises of drills and machinery is not my favorite way to read. That aside, I enjoyed to the end his distinctive voice and weirdly evocative language, the strange stories and funny tidbits about his beloved New Orleans. I loved the essay on cemeteries. The essays are pulled together from other published works of his, and together, they paint a picture that has definitely gotten me ready for NOLA.
August 28, 2022
Codrescu haș a distinct voice and a very entertaining way of describing scenes. However, this is a book I would recommend reading while simultaneously reading something else - because reading a half hour of these essays can start to feel a bit repetitive. Some parts are so loosely related and disjointed I suspect I will never know exactly what Codrescu was getting at; perhaps that's because of my non-NOLA status, but that certainly would narrow his audience quite a bit. I'm not sure the author recognizes his bohemian lifestyle isn't representative of New Orleans, and at times comes across as looking down on tourists or people who live anywhere else.
August 21, 2022
I knew if I wanted to truly experience New Orleans, and want to learn about the City, Lonely Planet was a no-go. I wanted something that talked about the soul of the City, the layers, the complexity, the people and their music, food and sense of belonging. The swings from opulence to destitution. How sweltering heat smells and feels. The cemeteries. The carnival season. Mardi Gras. This is not something to be observed as an outsider. This book delivers on everything you want from an insider’s point of view, and some more. Amazing read. Loved it. Can’t wait to visit now.
January 27, 2023
Picked by accident while buying a travel book on New Orleans.
Andrei Codrescu's essays greatly complimented the travel book. Whereas, I went to see the house that Anne Rice once owned in Garden District, Codrescu' provided me with a colourful story on Copeland v. Rice conflict on architecture and design. His writing style is magnificent - intellectual, sarcastic, worldly. The author is alien and local at the same time; it makes the glimpse to New Orleans as it was pre-Katrina very authentic.
Andrei Codrescu's essays greatly complimented the travel book. Whereas, I went to see the house that Anne Rice once owned in Garden District, Codrescu' provided me with a colourful story on Copeland v. Rice conflict on architecture and design. His writing style is magnificent - intellectual, sarcastic, worldly. The author is alien and local at the same time; it makes the glimpse to New Orleans as it was pre-Katrina very authentic.
June 2, 2022
3.5 stars. I bought this on a trip to New Orleans a few years back and finally started it on my most recent trip there. The book works best when it is read a couple of short essays at a time. I think anyone who has visited New Orleans will recognize many of the spots he talks about and appreciate how he captures what makes New Orleans a unique city in the US.
March 10, 2021
I really loved the earlier writings from the beginning of the book. I started to lose interest at around the halfway point. There were some truly poetic pieces about New Orleans. But as the book went on, I started not enjoying the author's voice/tone.
August 7, 2017
The stories were well written, easy to follow. That said, it didn't captivated me and I didn't feel it gave a real sense of New Orleans.
March 19, 2018
lyrical vignettes from an investigative poet
January 28, 2019
Absolutely beautiful writing. Soulful, emotional raw and real. Really loved this authors words.
February 3, 2019
Just great writing, clear, readable and highly evocative. Recommended for residents and for tourists too.
May 9, 2019
A wonderful collection of essays about New Orleans, most pre-Katrina. The style is evocative, humorous, quirky, and completely original.
October 20, 2020
I got home from New Orleans and longed to go back. This book took me there smartly.
November 3, 2021
The right book at the right time in my life. It has ignited a love in me for a city not my own.
March 23, 2022
An interesting mix of essays about New Orleans. I picked this up because we went to NOLA for spring break this year.
July 15, 2022
This heavily fed my superiority complex that comes from living in New Orleans.
June 4, 2023
Nice meanderings about New Orleans, with a few dated entries that cause a weird type of nostalgia.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 103 reviews