Paris, Paris: Journey Into the City of Light by David Downie

still get lost.
    Before leaving, I peered from a window at the Palais Omnisports across the street from the ministry. This semi-subterranean, pre-Mitterrand 1980 sports stadium boasts multicolored tubular metal frames, glass walls, and a steeply pitched roof covered with turf. The building is proof that grass can grow at a sixty-degree angle. Parisian kids claw their way up it and slide down. Some graffiti-aficionados are less gentle. Years ago I noticed that someone had physically torn out chunks of turf to form the characters “¥” “€” “$,” thereby demonstrating a yen for yen (¥), euros (€), and dollars ($). YES! The people most likely to read this cryptic message were of course the bigwigs in the ministry building. Strangely, I realized now that the “YES!” could still be made out. The grass, like the permanently ailing economies of Europe, has never quite recovered from the savaging.
    While enjoying a restorative dose of caffeine at a café outside the ministry’s moat, I asked the barman how the fortress complex had changed the neighborhood. Local businesses are profiting, he chortled. Real estate values have risen. “And who cares if it could be in Moscow,” he asked, jerking his thumb eastward. “The TGB is worse!”
    Upstream I crossed to the Left Bank at Tolbiac and stood before the Incan plinth on which the National Library rises amid a forest of construction cranes. Local redevelopment is still under way after a quarter-century of jackhammering. The library’s catchy official name is “Bibliothèque de France, Site François Mitterrand.” But everyone calls this one-billion-plus-dollar marvel the TGB (Très Grande Bibliothèque), a play on the acronym for the TGV high-speed train. Whatever you call it, the library is folie de grandeur incarnate.
    Subtle? From the Seine embankment the library’s four, three-hundred-foot towers of glass, designed to mimic open books on end, look like flying wedges poised atop a dance floor almost a thousand feet long. The wonderful brashness of it is startling, making the TGB possibly the world’s defining set piece of post-postmodernism.
    Can kitsch be dangerous? I skittered on buckling planks of tropical wood in the windswept shadows of the towers. A search among caged holly trees rattling in the wind revealed an entrance; fortunately I’d been here before and vaguely remembered the way. The site’s hidden heart is a glassed-in subterranean garden the length of two football fields, accessed via a tilted, moving sidewalk. Reportedly Mitterrand envisioned this as the twenty-first-century cloister of a neo-medieval monastery, inspired by Umberto Eco’s 1980s bestseller The Name of the Rose (later a Hollywood blockbuster starring Sean Connery). Set in a monastery, the tale was still the rage at the time Mitterrand’s courtiers came up with the TGB plan. The French government actually contemplated hiring Eco as a consultant. Like the caged hollies, the gardens’ handsome red pine trees double as contemporary bondage art, girded by steel cables so they won’t crash through the windows.
    Wind is not the only problem at the TGB. I still haven’t gotten used to genial young architect Dominique Perrault’s underground reading rooms, or his cleverness in storing books in glass towers, where retrofitted wooden panels block daylight. The original plan was worse: conveyor belts were to cross an open courtyard, exposing books to rain and sun. I stood now in the western atrium and had plenty of time to take in the view of leaking ceilings and plastic buckets extending almost seven hundred feet east. Hours can go by while you get a computerized pass then summon a book from a tower into a reading room half a mile away. Best of all is trying to exit: if your returned loan hasn’t been scanned back into the system, as happened to me, you can’t get out. Red lights flashed. The turnstile wouldn’t turn. Librarians and security guards leapt into action. Then Big