• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1113 0

not the sort of girl who crosses continents to meet up with a man she hardly knows,” she reveals, yet there she is, indeed meeting up with a Frenchman she’s only conversed with for approximately forty-five minutes. Thus begins this wonderful love story and memoir, in which you find yourself cheering for Turnbull at every step of her sometimes rough way. One aspect I especially like is that she shares a great number of French phrases that are quite useful: instead of ordering a verre de vin (glass of wine) at a café or restaurant, ask for a coup de pif (which she says is slang and untranslatable)—I did the last time I was in Paris and I just know the raised eyebrows of the waiter signified he was surprised I knew such a phrase.

C’est la Vie, Suzy Gershman (Viking, 2004). “I always knew that one day I would live in France,” Gershman writes on the first page of her memoir. “This was not a dream on my part, but a fact of life, not whispered in the winds of chance, but firmly written on the mistral of my life.” She had me right away with that, but she sealed it when she further explained that when she heard Billy Joel sing, “Vienna waits for you,” she knew exactly what he meant: Paris was her Vienna, and it was waiting for her. Trite as that may sound, I was completely on board—I identify enormously with song lyrics. Without giving away the details, the stage of Gershman’s life that is the subject of this book is sad, funny, and uplifting all at once, which is reason enough to read it. But she also reveals a lot of details about French traditions and daily life in Paris. One custom is the crémaillère, a party to show off a new home. The word derives from the expression pendre la crémaillère—to hang the saucepan on a hook over the fire. At the time the expression was coined, people cooked only on open fires, so when the saucepan was hung the house was ready. Today, in their version of a housewarming, “French people [invite] all their friends for the crémaillère, given as soon as the new home is set up and functioning—usually at a point just under one year after arrival.”

French Lessons, Alice Kaplan (University of Chicago Press, 1993). This well-written book was selected as a Notable Book of 1993 by the New York Times Book Review and was a National Book Critics Circle Award nominee. It’s an unusual memoir and an insightful work about language. I love the way she writes about learning and teaching French, her French summer camp in 1968, where if you were caught speaking one word of English you got a mauvais point, and her love affair with André on her junior year abroad. I also found her research on French fascist intellectuals—and her interview with the only one still living at the time, Maurice Bardèche (who has since passed away)—fascinating and unsettling.

I’ll Always Have Paris!, Art Buchwald (Putnam, 1996). I fully expected this memoir to be funny (it was), but I was unprepared for it also to be a bit sad. I should explain: I am the sort of person who still gets choked up when the Tin Man tells Dorothy his heart is breaking at the end of The Wizard of Oz, so you may not get as teary-eyed as I did when reading about Buchwald’s wife, Ann, who passed away before this book was published. She is present on nearly every page even when she’s not part of the narrative. But it’s hard for anyone not to laugh at Buchwald’s press-junket adventures with the International Herald Tribune and the VIPs he meets over the years. Very entertaining, with eight pages of black-and-white photos.

A Girl in Paris: A Persian Encounter with the West, Shusha Guppy (Tauris Parke, 2007). In his preface, Philip Mansel, author of one of my favorite books (Constantinople: City of the World’s Desire, 1453–1924), writes that “if there was one area of the world for which Paris, France and the French language possessed particular magnetism, it was the Middle East. In the Ottoman Empire in the 1830s, French became the second language of the governing classes. By the 1850s an Ottoman poet could write: ‘Go to Paris, young sir, if you have any wish; if you have