I imagines that this would be more of a whimsical read. Despite that I really enjoyed this book, it was both academic and easy to access. I would recommend. Thanks to netgalley and the publisher for an egalley.

A dense and thoughtful book packed with philosophy and academic references. It's also an insightful look at walking in 19th century literature and what city wanderings meant to some of the world's best writers including Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf and Edgar Allen Poe.

There are insights into the leisure of walking vs. capitalism's focus on efficiency, and scholarly writing on the role of walking and urban wandering in literature. A well-researched work of literary criticism on walking and the sometimes subversive and revolutionary connotations it can have. This collection of essays is a look at urban life, architecture and modern man's place in it all.

This book is excellently researched. It synthesizes incredibly difficult material very well, and presents what is, to me at least, a new understanding of a distinctively modern problematic. I highly recommend the book. Its primary drawback is stylistic. The prose interrupts itself in ways that I found obstructive – in order to reference other material, rather than to move the sentence forward. Other than that, though, it's well worth the read.

I thought this was going to be a more light, travel writing kind of read but that's due to my own ignorance about the author's work as a scholar, and forgetting, "oh, duh, the publisher is Verso!"

NOW I know :) and I'm not at all disappointed. I had no idea how completely this book was going to be my shit.

The Walker is a scholarly work that philosophizes the act of walking through (largely) 19th century literature. It's written by an academic for an academic audience. I really don't know much at all about the subject matter or works mentioned in the book aside from a few. It's dense, and took me a long while to finish (it's the same for all scholarly works I read, I have to reread paragraphs or pages, look up words in the dictionary, people on Wikipedia, add the books referenced to my "to read" list, and I stopped to highlight portions I loved often).

I kept interrupting my partner during the days and nights I read this book to read him passages I loved. Overall, the book is about how the body and the mind encounter the spaces they occupy, especially within urban/city environments of the 19th century. Some people "wander" in cities, some "disappear," some "collapse" or have panic attacks, some may feel connected to their environments or alienated. Each chapter focuses on a particular mode of existing within cities and how navigating them on foot manifested itself through the lens of specific writers (Poe, Dickens, Wells, Woolf, Bradbury).

People walk and encounter the world differently, bringing all of their neuroses and psychological, emotional states of being along with them. Beaumont explores how these bodies and mental states react as they bump into the world of newly modern and industrialized cities such as London and Paris.

I loved Beaumont's analysis of how walking is tied to capitalism and ideas of productivity that emerged around these times as well. I love the assertion about how walking can be either very anti-capitalist or very capitalist. Beaumont talks about how the world started to move faster. Some began to briskly walk to get from point A to point B, in the quickest way possible. Our human value was increasingly being tied to our productivity, or our ability to make money for other people. To wander, to saunter, or leisurely stroll, was beginning to be seen as wasteful, lazy, or even criminal, without value in a capitalist, modern society.

It made me think so much about the world today, about those with physical disabilities, about what it's like to walk in the world as a woman, how I have felt at home or not at home in small cities or big cities or abroad. It made me think about the lack of public transportation and the difficulty of walking within a vast majority of US cities, big and small, and how that has impacted me over the course of my life. I remember what it felt like the first time I visited a walkable city. I guess I just loved all the things the Walker made me think about.

What knowledge I have of art history (loved all the visual art references!! did I miss any reference to Giacometti? or Dada? or Futurism? I expected there to be some after I got into the book, I guess that was more 20th century?) and museum studies (understanding how bodies are impacted by and how they move within spaces is vital) really added to and enriched my experience of reading this book. I imagine if you're a reader that knows a lot about British or 19th century literature, you'd be even more jazzed than I was while reading this.

I want to read everything Matthew Beaumont ever wrote now. Fairly certain I highlighted 50% of this book out of pure joy and excitement. I live for this kind of book. Love, love, love, love.

Thanks to #NetGalley and Verso for sharing a copy of this book with me in exchange for an honest review.

Beaumont's book is a thorough and entertaining exploration of tropes of the urban "Walker." In many ways, it feels inspired by Marshal Berman's classic 1982 All That is Solid Melts into Air All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity. Whereas Berman demonstrates a chronological development of the representations of the modern, European city street, Beaumont takes a more thematical approach. Although his chapters analyze works of literature spanning two centuries in roughly chronological order, the real beauty of his book comes across in his kaleidoscopic view of the diversity of tropes of the man in the streets.

Regrettably, the book is overwhelmingly white and male. Beaumont addresses the latter of these points in his introduction, arguing that the modern European city has, typically and oppressively, been a masculine realm. Quoting Erika Diane Rappaport, he claims that a woman's ability to stroll in the 19th and 20th centuries "' was constrained by physical inconveniences and dangers as well as by social conventions that deemed it entirely improper for a bourgeois lady to roam alone out-of-doors.'" La flânuese was "not a common phenomenon." For this reason, Beaumont self-consciously concentrates on"the male territory" of the city. He does include a chapter on Woolf, albeit focusing on the predatory relationship between her male character, Peter, of Mrs. Dalloway. Generally speaking, the lack of female or BIPOC perspectives is a loss, but perhaps a not surprising one given the continuing hegemony of white men in western studies of literature (among, certainly, many other subjects).

Perhaps the most rewarding element of Beaumont's book is, as mentioned above, the kaleidoscopic scope of his content. He sets out to dethrone the image of the flâneur as the archetype of modern European urban walking. He writes, "The flâneur glorified by Baudelaire was never the comfortable, complacent bourgeois stroller that had been so fashionable in the 1840s in those illustrations and journalistic sketches . . . Baudelaire was already emphasizing the flâneur's restless, unsettling experience of both the life of the metropolitan street and his own skin." Every chapter presents a different way in which the idea of the flâneur faces a "crisis" of "not belonging." These crises span the experience of the Convalescent, freshly re-birthed in a city; the fugue states of walkers like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; the "politics of the visor" enforced by modern, opaque architecture; and many more.

Beaumont's explanation of convalescence, and particularly the escape of a convalescent from sickroom quarantine into the outside world, is particularly appealing in the context of our current pandemic. Indeed, the book at large makes one both long for and vicariously experience the now (temporarily) distant experience of urban life. The thrill of being out, amongst crowds of strangers, in the multifaceted relationship between individual and society, human and built environment, has become an entirely different (although no less, perhaps even more political one) than in non-pandemic times. Beaumont's well-timed ode to the "anti-heroes" of the city reminds one both of the joyful urban experience that we eagerly look to return to as well as the problems, concrete as well as philosophical, that persist in our cities.

Finally, Beaumont deserves recognition for his wonderful combination of humour and analysis. Although The Walker - On Losing and Finding Yourself in the Modern City is not a funny book per se, Beaumont seems to relish in the playfulness of academic discourse. Perhaps my personal favorite chapter, Chapter 8 "Beginning," is dedicated to the Big Toe. Beaumont makes a serious and well-formed (and quite creative) argument in favor of the Big Toe as the defining feature and "beginning of" humanity. And yet, for this reader at least, he never escaped the ridiculousness of the suggestion. In this way, he escaped the dry, sometimes navel-gazing tone of academic analysis without compromising on the interest of the analysis itself. At the confluence of the two, you get tongue-in-cheek passages like Beaumont's conclusion that "[Georges] Bataille, it might be said, calls for the dictatorship of the toeleprariat."

Beaumont seems to build an overarching arugment that the city is inherently unwelcoming to pedestrians, calling upon Walkers to take up a masked "politics of the visor" in order to fight back against a real or perceived architectural surveillance state. This conclusion is convincing enough but pales in comparison to the interest of the chapters individually. The Walker is an interesting jaunt across modern European literary cities and, like any good jaunt, it's value lies in the curious twists and turns found along the way.

An interesting work of literary criticism, examining the role of people walking in different pieces of important historical fiction. I'm more interested in the philosophy of walking, but I did find the ideas engaging. Because this is addressing so many other works, it inspired me to read a lot more important old books, but that also delayed my reading of this book as each essay involved reading another book or three. I'd recommend this for fans of literary criticism, the authors involved, walking or cities & urbanism more generally. The authors & works he looks at include Andre Breton's Nadja, Poe, Dickens, Bellamy, HG Wells, GK Chesterton, Ford Madox Ford, Woolf, George Bataille & Ray Bradbury. This is the kind of book I keep on the table to read an essay/chapter at a time then set aside for a month - it reminds to read deeply and lets the ideas percolate through other books and every day life.

Many thanks to Verso Books and NetGalley for the ARC.

I requested The Walker because I've done some academic work about moving through the 19th-century city. I always like learning more about subjects I've studied, and this book promised discussions on Poe and Dickens as well as some later authors I'm interested in. And I wasn't disappointed. Beaumont draws on all the scholars and concepts I studied: Walter Benjamin, Baudelaire's flâneur, Michel de Certeau, Judith Walkowitz, the panopticon, etc. I will say, this will likely be a difficult book to follow for someone who has no background in the subject.

My favorite chapters were definitely the ones on Charles Dickens and Virginia Woolf. Beaumont focuses on Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop, looking especially at the opening scene in which Little Nell encounters Master Humphrey out in the London streets one night. I haven't read The Old Curiosity Shop, but Beaumont's excellent analysis pulled me right in. In a different chapter, he looks at Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, which I have read. I was particularly intrigued by his discussion of Peter Walsh's predatory behavior while walking. It was interesting and especially relevant to the idea of walking in the modern city.

In addition to drawing on concepts I'm familiar with, Beaumont also introduces ideas that were new to me. In the first chapter, he looks at Edgar Allan Poe's "The Man of the Crowd" and the figure of the convalescent. In the sixth chapter, he looks at Ford Madox Ford's Return to Yesterday and the figure of the agoraphobic. I had never throughout about either the convalescent or the agoraphobic as mobile figures in the city, so I enjoyed reading Beaumont's views on them. I had also never heard of Ford's work before, so I intend to check him out.

Like many academic works, this book is fairly dense and theoretical. While I did enjoy it for the most part, there were times when it became too much and things went over my head. The final chapter in particular I found difficult to get through. It refers a lot of Jacques Derrida, who I always have trouble with. There are also moments when Beaumont goes off on tangents that don't quite seems relevant to the subject. This occurred quite often in the eighth chapter on Georges Bataille's "Big Toe." I had a difficult time understanding that chapter and didn't quite see how a lot of it tied into walking in the city.

Overall, The Walker is an excellent academic read on walking in the city. It's dense, but definitely worth it for those who are interested in the subject.

Very original work, slow-read but inspiring. It is a compilation of earlier essays, and the reader should be aware that the author is focused rather on literary criticism than the walking itself, with references to writers from Dickens to Wolf to Bradbury. There are also some personal recollections but the style of this book is mostly academic.

Thanks to the publisher, Verso Books, and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.

Thank you to the author, Verso Books and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I wanted to like this book - I tried so very hard to get into it, and to like it... but it was too much for me. Too dense, too academic, too much literary criticism and not enough real life. I am sure this will find its audience of enthusiastic readers, but the description led me to expect something different, and what I got was not something I would read, given the choice. I slogged through it due to my feeling of responsibility, having received an ARC and all, but the only part that I really enjoyed was the Afterword, with the author giving his own perspective, exploration and thoughts, rather than an academic treatise on works of classic literature.

I enjoyed it. However, it was much more cerebral than I anticipated. It was dense with intellectual theory on the benefits of walking. I enjoyed his literary references from Charles Dickens, Edgar Allen Poe, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rys, Ray Bradbury.
"Dickens compares himself to the restlessness of a great city the way it tumbles and tosses before it can go to sleep."
"Every nightwalk is thus a fugue or psychogenic flight-an escape from the self and at the same time-a plunge into its depths."
I enjoyed the psychological perspective of the mental benefits of walking. I am a distance walker, and at times, I feel as though I am walking aimlessly. I felt this book explained the purpose of walking aimlessly, as a means of self reflection and the fact that "compulsive wandering is linked to compulsive wondering."
Thank you NetGalley and Verson for the opportunity to read this delightful book!
jb
https://seniorbooklounge.blogspot.com/

Highly enjoyable, despite being an academic reading not easy to classify. I particularly liked the way Beaumont structured the chapters, focusing on different types of walking the city (convalescing, fleeing, collapsing, etc.) with relevant examples from various works of fiction.

Very well researched and quite dense, I have to admit that the parts that shifted from literature were not as exciting for me, personally. However, it brought to my attention many interesting books and authors.

This is a wonderful piece of work, a fanciful weaving-together and contrasting of early modern literature, focused on authors' and artists' practices of walking and wandering in the manner of the archetypal flâneur. In the manner of many of my favorite books, it is a difficult text to categorize. While literary criticism is the vehicle, the book is primarily social commentary, in which he uses different 'modes' of walking or existing in public space (fleeing, wandering, stumbling, collapsing, etc.) to complicate the notion of the modern subject. The book's central gimmick is a line from André Breton: “There are no lost steps!”. With this, Beaumont shows that there profound commentary on modern existence etched into the scenes of urban street-walking from early modern literature. This becomes Beaumont's crie de cœur for 'a modernism of the streets', the attempt of authors to 'make the cities with which they were familiar seem new or strange by traversing them aimlessly'.

My only reservation (perhaps unfair, since this is a work of literary criticism), is that Beaumont's enthusiasm for the topic predisposes him to quote multiple authors in a single breath, often with his own inexplicable commentary on their quality. But: a small price to pay.

I found the formal logic of the book challenging, but I have convinced myself that it serves a purpose, and is in fact rather artful. After the introduction, each of the nine chapters treats one piece of fiction extensively, though often with extended digressions on other relevant works. In this manner, we proceed through works by Poe, Dickens, Bellamy, H.G. Wells, G.K. Chesterton, Ford Maddox Ford, Woolf, Bataille, and Bradburry. Abruptly, then, chapter 10 does not focus on any particular piece of literature. Suddenly, Beaumont is addressing us directly, and taking us on a strangely literal tour of a particular mode of architecture. My explanation is this: form, in this book, mirrors content. Beaumont takes us on a nine-chapter traversal of the literature, seemingly aimlessly, but all the while allowing us to develop a political consciousness of how we inhabit and move through urban space. His final digression, which might almost be an article in the Guardian, shows us how the trends he identifies in the literature have shaped the present we inhabit.

For my own sake, I have to note that I was enormously moved by Beaumont's Afterword, which is a short meditation on the Tyburn Tree, the infamous gallows of London that stood at the corner of modern-day Hyde Park, very near to Marble Arch. Beaumont contrasts the empty imperialist bombast of the Arch, which leads nowhere and commemorates nothing, with the ignominy of the small paving stone that marks Tyburn Tree, whose victims number in the tens of thousands. In a beautiful coincidence, I read much of this book in Washington Square Park, New York's most famously social space. The arch here is similarly triumphalist, and also famously built on the bones of the wretched of its own empire (in this case, the re-possessed land of Angolan slaves, and a potter's field with over 20,000 bodies). I am here, many miles from my home in Harlem, because this is the first place I have come to resume in-person activities, as the reality of the COVID lockdown unfolds. Two months ago, a block west, I was part of a crowd chanting our entitlement to the streets as we forced police into retreat, to the safety of sixth avenue; now, I attend an in-person Marxist reading group here, where it's difficult to hear each other over masks and the sounds of six other overlapping interpersonal realities jostling in the air, as they always have in this park. The police still maintain a heavy presence in or near the park, but as of last week had retreated to two small groups, circling each leg of the arch, to prevent graffiti. As we left, the park's ubiquitous punk teenagers were shouting at the cops: quoting the NYPD misconduct reports that had just been published. In short, there is hardly a better place to imagine a new politics of the street.

A fascinating book a book that caught my attention from the first pages.The art of walking thoughts as you walk through eyes of many different people A book I will be recommending,#netgalley#versobooks

I liked this overall and it was interesting to see the idea of the flaneur through multiple authors' eyes and from various time periods. I liked the writing style and how the quotes was embedded in the writing well. The city was shown in many way and through various eyes and this showed the city as an ever changing thing. This book was fascinating and interesting overall.

<i>"Isn't it really quite extraordinary to see that, since man took his first steps, no one has asked himself why he walks, how he walks, if he has ever walked, if he could walk better, what he achieves in walking?"</i>
—
Slowly coming out of a long period of nationwide lock-down and self-quarantine, simply going out on a stroll in the city has taken on a strange, elating, fresh importance. As I walked in the re-awakening streets, I found myself thinking about this book that nudges the walker to think more about each step we take, elevating walking into a meditation.
Anchored in great works of literature, The Walker is undoubtedly an incredibly well researched book that takes a philosophical deep-dive into the meaning of modernity on the urban space from a pedestrian point of view.
This work weaves through all the themes that impact the psychology of walking: literature, of course, but also architecture, technology, philosophy, society, economy and politics.
However, it does feel a lot more academic than your average non-fiction books, and it is surely a densely informational read that might be difficult to get through at times.
If nothing else, this book will add some valuable new entries to your future TBR list with its wide range of great literary references.

I really enjoyed this academic writing about walking. It was professionally described from many different angles and points of view. The amount of writers, who were taken into account while discussing the walking is vast and impressive- Skakespeare, Dickens, Plato, Nietzsche- just to mention a few. I would strongly recommend it to anybody who likes dissertations and is passionate about academic reading. Enjoy!