A Year in the Merde
A Year in the Merde
Stephen Clarke
….Or the Tribulations of a Brit in France. Paul West, a young successful British executive, gets a job in a French company and starts a new life in Paris.
There he discovers the pleasure of love and uninhibited, sensual ladeez, the generosity of the social security system, the joy of buying a house in the country, ze unintellegebeul Fronch hacent, the still vivid memory of a lost empire, the French “political conscience” in a 2003 war-on-Iraq context in which being a Brit in France can be of suicidal tendency.
French society at its best (and worst) through the eyes of a rosbeef…. Hilarious, cynical, but yet affectionate, S. Clarke loves France and it transpires from his text.
Quite a funny book from a French reader’s perspective, I realised that I somewhat took a lot of my culture for granted. I liked the bit where the Americans/Brits who had lived in France so long couldn’t really speak English anymore, creatively mixing both languages, not even bothering with looking for the English word when it came up in French. I could relate to that, the other way round, that is.The writing in itself is quite young and careless, plenty of bad words to satisfy my dirty French mind. It is remindful of Bill Bryson’s work (go for “Notes from a Big Country”, you won’t be disappointed) in a more fictional way, and the sequel “Merde, Actually” is out in September…. So we’ll meet again.
Brought to you by Sandrine @ 9:46 am
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