Читать Paris Nights and Other Impressions of Places and People: A Collection of Stories - Bakhtiyar Sakupov

Paris Nights is a collection of short stories united by the theme of “fireplace stories” told in the cozy living room of a hostel. It’s where at night, people who come from all over the world to Paris, and are imbued with the romance and sensuality of this city, begin to share the most unusual or ordinary love stories and experiences.

We are not just storytellers. We are listeners, partners in some way, discussing, prompted by, and sharing our experience if there is something in the story that’s consonant with our past.

That is why this book is valuable. Everyone will find here one or more stories that would remind him of his own experience and, perhaps, prompt a brilliant solution for the situation.

This book brings hope to all those people who have lost faith in love and its magic, who stopped believing in their own strengths and good luck.

In each line, I convey the unforgettable atmosphere of these nights in the hostel’s living room so that you, sitting in a comfortable armchair with a book in your hand, immediately move there, inhaling the aroma of good coffee and listening to the leisurely speech of the next narrator.

Jean belonged to that category of people who managed to become adults and escaped the youthful age with its passions, delights, heart dramas and other fascinations, which he considered obviously doubtful. In spite of the fact that he was born and had grown up in one of the most beautiful towns in Paris, the suburb of Bougival, where even Turgenev was inspired to write his new masterpieces, Jean was skeptical about everything that, according to him, “didn’t exist”.

At what moment of his life he suddenly decided that “love” is a myth, undeserving of his precious attention, was a mystery. But the fact remained the fact. Love was an abstract thing for Jean; it was from the field of a fiction, a parallel reality. Certainly, he belonged to those who outlived similar feelings, slightly scornfully, with a sneer.

And of course, Jean considered himself the Parisian. It’s such a light snobbery that made him feel better and create an ideal image.

Jean was always planning. He planned all his life; and if he knew precisely how many years were destined to him, he would schedule every day down to the second, pedantically following the plan. However, Destiny adores laughing at such pedants.