A student recommended a pair of good books I read recently: Marc Augé’s Un ethnologue dans le métro (published in 1986, translated into English as In the Metro) and Le métro revisité (published in 2008, not translated into English). I enjoyed both and recommend them.

This pair of slender works –each best read at one sitting, in a train or on a plane or over a tranquil weekend afternoon– lets the reader spend some time with a writer who is intelligent and insightful, even if not always easy to follow.

Marc Augé is an anthropologist and very much a French intellectual. He has a lot to say, about many things, including about the Paris metro, which he defines (my translation) as “togetherness without festival, and solitude without isolation”. Augé explains, lucidly, what he means by each of these words. But Augé does not write only, or even mostly, about the metro. He instead uses the metro “as a metaphor of individual and social life, with its directions, its life lines, its changes and connections.”

Augé’s writing turns, suddenly and unexpectedly, from fascinating musing on religious faith to analysis of how Paris has changed. Augé develops, then expands on, a typology of beggars. Other parentheticals seem never to close: Augé’s discussion of the work of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss leads to a gloss on the latter’s examination of the work of another anthropologist, Marcel Mauss.

If you’re a French-reading English-speaker who liked the film “My Dinner With André”, then I expect that you’d enjoy reading Augé. Lots of big ideas and smart insights.