Travel to France

Words in a French Life: Lessons in Love and Language from the South of France

Format: Hardcover
Author: Kristin Espinasse
ReleaseDate: 25 April, 2006
Publisher: Touchstone
Rating:

Enfants Terribles
She is still a relatively young woman and had been in France only thirteen years, so people still ask her "Ca vous manque les Etats-Unis?"

As she admits, she missed things instead of people, as befits an observer whose preference is for the storied multitudinousness of things. As an American boy growing up in rural France, I would so have enjoyed meeting a sophisticated, yet all-American matron in the next town like Kristin Espinasse, who was way after my time. She missed cranberry cocktails, peanut butter, shower curtains, happy hour, air conditioning and even the humble family meal of Thanksgiving that comes once a year here in the States. She did not miss her home nor the people she had grown up with. But those of us who have followed her famous blog for years know why, for she had fallen in love with a GRAND example of French l'amour, a wine salesman who is known far and wide to readers of "French Word a Day" as "Sex on Two Legs. " Her humble desert home in Phoenix had some appealing, American modernist touches, the stark white light you see on Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings of cow skulls and hydrangea, or the little roadrunner that Arizona youth take as their emblem. But in provence where Espinasse now makes her home, her maison, all bets are off and so far away are her Modernist touchstones that she has stumbled, like Kate Hudson in the Merchant-Ivory film LE DIVORCE, into an incredibly simple world of ancient France, where vocabulary is the key to understanding. Some Espinasse fans love her kids, while I sometimes find them a little annoying, the way they are constantly picking on their mom for her (absurdly minor) mistakes in French--are they somehow picking up on tensions in her marriage, or are they just born brats--what my grandma used to call "fresh"? As an American boy in France, I thought all adults, both native born and tourist, in alliance against the kids; certainly they managed to show a united front of hauteur. At Chez Espinasse, every time poor Kristin fumbles for a word, the kids are in her face sneering triumphantly like mean little Napoleons.

Some readers in my book club have complained that none of the charming photos that decorate her blog manage to make their way into the book. They echo Alice in Wonderland when they complain, "What use is a book without pictures or conversations"? Well, there are plenty of conversations here, and not all of them the dispiriting kind in which your children snicker as you mispronounce "sans" as "cent," (without, for 100). Her neighbors, some of them the very French farming and shopowning kin that feature in Peter Mayle's bestselling books about Provence, have a lot of face time, and even some of her American friends make an appearance from time to time. You will learn oodles of French without even knowing it--tu piges? ("Get it?").

Not all points create a portrait
Unfortunately, despite several attempts to make good progress moving from cover to cover, I couldn't bring myself to do it. I'm a fan of Kristin Espinasse's "French Word-a-Day" blog, and so was looking forward to reading this book. I have to conclude that what works very well in a blog just doesn't translate (so to speak) very well to a book.

I suppose my attempt might have succeeded better had I tried to read this the way I read her blog: one small section at a time, with a day or so in between samples. If you approach it like that, it's probably not a bad way to pick up some French vocab and get a sense of daily life in the south of France. If, however, you're looking for a Peter-Mayle-esque book *about* living in the south of France, this really is not it: the vignettes of her life are too short -- and, as another reviewer put it, too mundane -- really to illuminate much of wider application. If that *is* what you're looking for, and if you like your reading broken up into small sections, then I much more enthusiastically recommend Mayle's new book "Provence A to Z. "

The author may have been trying to create a Pointillist image of Provençal living, but sadly all I could see was the individual dots. Maybe the secret is a little more time and distance? In the meantime, though, it's back to Mayle for me.

Surprises in Living in France
Her offerings are written in a delightful way, and include her lessons in humility by both being an American living in France and by having French-born children who are willing to correct her mistakes! I would recommend this book to anyone interested in a cross-cultural experience, but especially to those like me who love all things French. This book is a compilation of vignettes on daily life in France from an Arizonan who married a French wine merchant.

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