Jean-Paul Clebert was a boy from a respectable middle-class family who ran away from school, joined the French Resistance, and never looked back. Making his way to Paris at the end of World War II, Clebert took to living on the streets, and in Paris Vagabond, a so-called "aleatory novel" assembled out of sketches he jotted down at the time, he tells what it was like. His "gallery of faces and cityscapes on the road to extinction" is an astonishing depiction of a world apart--a Paris, long since vanished, of the poor, the criminal, and the outcast--and a no...