Ron Peters's Reviews > The Walker: On Losing and Finding Yourself in the Modern City

Initially, I believed that The Walker was a literary exploration of the Beaudelairean flâneur's history, both in literature and society. My mistake was not reading beyond the book's synopsis.

The book description made it sound quite jolly. It studies ways in which “the act of walking is one of escape, self-discovery, disappearances, and potential revolution. Pacing stride for stride alongside such literary amblers and thinkers as Edgar Allen Poe, Andrew Breton, H G Wells, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and Ray Bradbury, Matthew Beaumont explores the relationship between the metropolis and its pedestrian life.”

Instead, it is mainly a tedious mishmash of post-modern psychobabble that painfully attempts to tie modernist writing about city walkers to an analysis of the alienating evils of capitalism.

Browsing Amazon, I came across Frederico Castigliano's (2017) Flâneur: The Art of Wandering the Streets of Paris. Reading the sample, I realized that this book is more aligned with what I had in mind when I picked up Beaumont.