Flirting with French: How a Language Charmed Me, Seduced Me, and Nearly Broke My Heart / William Alexander

Not since David Sedaris’s Me Talk Pretty One Day have I read such a humorous and entertaining chronicle of an adult attempting to learn French.

There are many funny language situations, made all the more amusing by the author’s apparent linguistic tone deafness. Can a 58-year-old pick up a language like French? He discusses this proposition with some experts and cites some linguistic theory behind the mechanism of language learning, interspersed with his dogged (and frequently laughable) attempts to master French. Alexander seems to eschew the traditional approach of memorizing verb forms and vocabulary (forever scarred by a battle axe school teacher), and instead embraces the purportedly effortless newfangled approaches of products like Rosetta Stone and social media with native speakers. All of this is complicated with recurring medical drama he has with his heart (alluded to in the subtitle), problems that he speculates may be stress-induced due to his attempts at tackling French. In the end he seems to reach détente with his target language. A scan of his brain seems to prove that he recognizes French prosody, but still can’t understand much. Oh well, at least he can negotiate a taxi ride at the airport during a bomb scare and has learned never to order rognons de veau. Can a 58-year-old learn French? In this case he can (sort of), as long as he keeps a sense of humor.

Comments

The Silent Patient / Alex Michaelides

A woman viciously murders her seemingly doting husband. We meet up with her several years later in a mental facility, where a therapist tries to get her to speak and to reveal her story. Who is innocent and who is the victim? The answer isn’t straightforward. The resolution to the novel features a real twist that will have the reader questioning the chronology of the different narrative threads in the book. A real page-turner.

Transient Desires / Donna Leon

Book 30 of the Guido Brunetti mystery series. I haven’t read them all, but enough to enjoy a visit back with a familiar character in a setting I love. Two female American college students are left wounded and unconscious outside the hospital emergency room in the middle of the night. Brunetti soon discovers who left them there, but the question remains why? The plot involves a nephew indebted to his criminal and abusive uncle, and illegal human trafficking. The book ends rather abruptly, and you may get the sense that after twenty-nine installments of the series, the author might just be phoning it in. Nevertheless, this book represented a nice little trip back to a Venice where real people live and work, and this to me is never a waste of time. I downloaded this to my iPad.

Murder in Passy, An Aimée Leduc Investigation / Cara Black

If you like your mysteries set in European locales, here’s a Parisian detective series that is sure to please. Aimée Leduc is a private eye, born of a French career detective and an absentee American mother (brief hints of angst over this in this installment). She’s appeared in about ten adventures, always set in iconic Parisian neighborhoods : Murder in the Marais, Murder in the Bastille, Murder in Montmartre, and Murder in the Latin Quarter , to name a few. In Murder in Passy (Paris’s tony XVIe arrondissement), Aimée finds herself mixed up in a murderous intrigue involving the French arm of the Basque nationalist movement. The final chase involves the kidnapping of a Spanish princess, a secret torture chamber used by the Gestapo in WWII, and a rooftop escape. The author sprinkles enough French words into the dialogue to either annoy you or make you feel your French 101 was not for nothing— Zut alors! très chic, c’est parfait, désolé, c’est tout! Oh, and Aimée’s frequent stop...

Peachy Reads

Search This Blog