It’s a truth universally acknowledged that good travel books will always reveal more about the author than it will about the destination under discussion.* (Er, that is, with the notable exception of the brilliant William Dalrymple, my all-time favorite travel writer who could make anyone fall in love with, say, Minot, North Dakota. He’s just that good.**)
So it is with Charles Timoney, the veddy veddy British author of Pardon My French: Unleash Your Inner Gaul. Think of this as a linguistic guidebook to everyday French living. Timoney, a twenty-five-year resident of Paris, has compiled a comprehensive dictionary, of sorts, of common and not-so-common phrases that he’s struggled with over the years and which he believes are crucial to fitting in to French society.
He divides his book into situation-specific chapters, namely, Food and Drink; The Country, and How to Get About It; Education; Entertainment and Sport; Paperwork; The Calendar Year; How to Sound French; Historical Matters and Perfidious Albion; Young People (And Their Slang); Relations (Family and Others); Day-to-Day Life; and The Business World. Within each chapter, he introduces particular words and phrases, from eau de source to sommier to, yes, Oh la la!
This is not, in other words, the tome to tote for your next weeklong jaunt to the City of Light. Au contraire, this is primarily for people with the crazy idea of actually wanting to put down roots in France and who want to really, really get into its complicated heart. In fact, you won’t even find the phrase Au contraire in the entire book. Go ahead. I dare you to find it.
Still, I would definitely recommend this to anyone who wants to dig more deeply into the intricacies of French culture, beyond the baguette-waving, beret-sporting, scarf-wearing, Sartre-reading, cafe-au-lait-sipping stereotypes. You won’t necessarily learn how to order a hamburger in France (although if that’s actually what you’re looking for, this isn’t the book for you), but you will get a glimpse into the arcane reasoning behind, say, why the French hate the British. (Hint: It has something to do with Jeanne D’Arc, the battle of Fontenoy in 1745, and something about a perfidious Albion. I’m still trying to figure it all out.)
Timoney does devote a great deal of his word count comparing the British way of doing things with that of the French. Reading the book as an American is almost akin to watching a tennis match, where one’s blessedly uninvolved status as a spectator allows one to peacefully watch two competitors volley back and forth from the sidelines without having to worry about getting stuck in the middle. Timoney obviously loves his adopted home, but he doesn’t hesitate to poke gentle fun at what he considers France’s odd, occasionally infuriating quirks.
Take, for example, the idea of the wedding cake. Anyone who’s ever attended a wedding in the United States, especially in the last twenty-five or so years, will be familiar with the standard “look” of the bridal cake. Martha Stewart went and tipped tradition on its head a few years ago by replacing the conventional tiers of sheet cake with layers of individual cupcakes, but you get the idea. Anyway, according to Mr. Timoney, no matter how much you try and explain your visions of an American-style wedding cake, what an engaged couple will actually get in France is what’s known as une pièce montée, or — duh — wedding cake.
It’s apparently a tower of “pastry balls filled with vanilla cream and stuck together with sugared icing.” Yum-O! In other words, it may look different, but it will still have that same gooey-sweet taste as any other wedding cake the world over. The funniest part of the whole section, though, is when Timoney rather charmingly recounts his friends’ consternation when he was married in France and couldn’t send them back pieces of the wedding cake, “as we would by British tradition.” I was then left with this head-scratching image of someone trying to send a sticky, messy glob of leftover wedding cake overseas via the United States Postal Service. The mind reels.
Reading this book reminds me yet again of just how individual each country is, and how determined each one is to remain steadfastly unique in an increasingly globalized world. It brought back the hilarious but oh-so-apropos punchline delivered by a brilliant (and, dare I say, good-looking) American consultant named Robert Juppe, who spoke at the Tokyo orientation I and fellow Westerners attended on our first week in Japan as new residents and English teachers, waaaay back in 1994: “In Japan, there’s no right way. There’s no wrong way. There’s the way.”
And apparently, so it is in France.
Happy reading!
*I’m making this up. I’ve no idea if this statement is true. I’ve just always wanted to use that famous opening phrase from Jane Austen.
**My apologies to the good people of Minot, ND, for any potential offense I may have caused. I’ve actually spent some time in Minot and can honestly say that I’ve yet to visit a friendlier place.
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{ 3 comments }
Hi, weddng cake in England is made of rich fruit cake and can be cut into neat little slices and packed into the special boxes made for sending some to distant friends. The story is that if a girl sleeps with a piece of wedding cake under her pillow she will dream of her future husband. BTW, a light sponge cake for a wedding would be seen as a cheap option in England.
I wonder if the French toss a piece of the cake dans le frigo.
You can see the french version of a wedding cake (croquembouche) here:
http://www.wedding-cakes.co.uk/
Delicious, but nothing like an American wedding cake.
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