THE FLANEUR Edmund White (Bloomsbury, $16.95) JOURNEY TO PORTUGAL Jose Saramago (Harcourt, $30)

White, the novelist and biographer, titles his historical tour of Paris after a classic urban type, the observer who walks the streets in search of experience. The Flaneur strolls through the histories of Parisians living on the city's social margins -- Jews, gays, immigrants, bohemians -- and features brisk riffs on the Dreyfus affair and Josephine Baker, nimble sketches of Baudelaire and Colette and the like. It's all smart but all slight, no more substantive than a cafe conversation. Saramago has, supposedly, grander ambitions; the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature declares that his book is ''a pursuit'' of his native country's culture. The novelist spent half a year rambling across Portugal, mainly sizing up churches and gazing at statuary, occasionally discovering rapture. The book sometimes succeeds as an evocation of traveling itself -- its false steps and imaginative flights -- even though it's really just a scattered catalog of landmarks and relies with infuriating frequency on a surprising excuse for a writer of this stature: ''Words don't suffice to describe....'' Flaneur: B Journey: B-