This is no ordinary memoir, or even an alternative travel guide. It's a tale of Julian Green's obsession with the French capital, a love of place that is a kind of possession: "Thinking about the capital all the time, I rebuilt it inside myself. I replaced its physical presence with something else, something almost supernatural."

Green takes on the role of flâneur in this book: the leisurely, Baudelairean dandy originally identified and named by Walter Benjamin. This flâneur perspective has two implications for the text. First, Paris is a languid and bourgeois memoir, indulgent and at times hyperbolic, though it has many moments of truly arresting beauty.

Second, the attention to detail is astonishing, and reflects the memories of someone who has devoted years of their life to the art of getting lost in the city. Green urges readers to "waste time", and to experience "the faint distress that comes from thinking you have lost your way".

The sensibility of this metropolitan love song is romantic but gritty; Green actively seeks out the filth of industry as much as he does the trappings of the gilded gentry. He chooses a route down a particular street, the rue Jean Bologne, over another simply "because of its coal depot, the inhuman beauty of which has the horrifying attraction of a lunar landscape".

"I shall always see Paris as the setting for a novel that will never be written," writes Green in this brief but beautiful collection of essays. Born in Paris in 1900 to American parents, Green spent most of his life there. He wrote in French and Penguin are to be congratulated for publishing this as a bilingual edition. First published in 1983, some of the pieces were written as early as 1943. His wonderfully evocative descriptions of Parisian streets, parks and buildings are full of a melancholy nostalgia for a passed era. The sight of the "majestic" Seine full of fish poisoned by pollution fills him with rage. By contrast, he is overjoyed by the discovery of a 15th-century cloister near the Hôtel de Ville. Its "pensive arcades" cause him to reflect on the "peace we have lost" in today's world. For Green, Paris is "haunted with memories" and its spaces are pregnant with mystery. There is a "secret city" invisible to the casual visitor: "Until you have wasted time in a city, you cannot pretend to know it well." There is no more eloquent guide to hidden Paris.