We've got a ticket to read

Sartre? Camus? Hugo? Jordan? What exactly do Parisians read on the metro on their way to work? We went on an underground quest to find out.

Interviews by Katie Toms and Robert McCrum

Sunday October 28, 2007The Observer

The game I like to play in Paris, especially with my wife, who is a whiz at it, is Sartre. The rules are simple and it requires no special equipment or even a knowledge of French. You just have to have an appreciation of Gallic cultural cliches and to be, preferably, on the Left Bank, or Rive Gauche, as one likes to say. The object of the game is to score points for spotting everyday Parisians who seem somehow to express an angsty, existential esprit, or at least an awareness of la vie bohème.

So it's 10 points for a black beret, five points for a leather jacket and two points
for a lighted Gauloises or a demitasse. Existential stubble, plus a beret,
is 20 points. In the spirit of anarchie, players are encouraged to announce
their own sightings and award themselves points accordingly. On one
memorable occasion, I maxed out by spotting a young Parisienne wearing a
beret and smoking a cigarette while seated in a cafe reading a copy of
Albert Camus's L'etranger.

The metro, such a pleasant and efficient contrast to London's tube, is probably a good place to warm up for a game of Sartre. But you'll never get a really high score down here.
For that, you need cafes, bars and tabacs and the anomie of autumnal
boulevards. The metro is - how can I put this ? - just too social and
probably too banal. It sponsors reading habits that would give Jean-Paul
apoplexy. In the sample we reproduce here, for instance, the choices tend
towards bestselling crime and glossy magazines such as Ca m'interesse (New
Scientist-lite), index. neither of which merits a high score on the Sartre index.
However, on closer inspection, it turns out to be a promising sample and distinctly Parisian.
Ingrid Mongin holds a detective novel with 'ennuis' in the title, and
Lavinia de Naro Papa is reading Victor Hugo. A bourgeois bestseller from the Second Empire is impressive enough - how many London tube travellers read William Thackeray? - and Lavinia gets a bonus for saying that her favourite reading is Alessandro Baricco. No one on The Observer's metro was reading La nausée, or La chute, or En attendant Godot, but that, surely, speaks to the decline of the avant-garde.

Read the full piece here.