Americans -- France -- Biography. |
Authors, American -- 21st century -- Biography. |
France -- Social life and customs -- 21st century. |
Sothen, John von |
Yankees |
American authors |
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Summary
Summary
A hilarious, candid account of what life in France is actually like, from a writer for Vanity Fair and GQ
Americans love to love Paris. We buy books about how the French parent, why French women don't get fat, and how to be Parisian wherever you are. While our work hours increase every year, we think longingly of the six weeks of vacation the French enjoy, imagining them at the seaside in stripes with plates of fruits de mer.
John von Sothen fell in love with Paris through the stories his mother told of her year spent there as a student. And then, after falling for and marrying a French waitress he met in New York, von Sothen moved to Paris. But fifteen years in, he's finally ready to admit his mother's Paris is mostly a fantasy. In this hilarious and delightful collection of essays, von Sothen walks us through real life in Paris--not only myth-busting our Parisian daydreams but also revealing the inimitable and too often invisible pleasures of family life abroad.
Relentlessly funny and full of incisive observations, Monsieur Mediocre is ultimately a love letter to France--to its absurdities, its history, its ideals--but it's a very French love letter: frank, smoky, unsentimental. It is a clear-eyed ode to a beautiful, complex, contradictory country from someone who both eagerly and grudgingly calls it home.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Vanity Fair writer von Sothen delights in this wry narrative about the gritty, grumpy realities of being an American adjusting to the Gallic lifestyle. In lighthearted essays, von Sothen describes how his life changed after marrying a French actor named Anais, who convinced him to move to Paris, he deadpans, by "shooting me in the neck with a dart gun and bundling me off." But, as Anais is "technically a countess" and has an 18th-century country home in Normandy, he acknowledges his landing was nicely cushioned. His quippy observations of 15 years living in France include the French way of overpreparing for trips ("Vacations are not just times to relax in France, they're subtle status symbols"), his linguistic shortcomings ("I speak French like Arnold Schwarzenegger speaks English"), and discovering that Fox News had reported that his Paris neighborhood was a "No-Go Zone" because of Muslim riots (while "my neighborhood wasn't a 'caliphate of Paristinians'... it wasn't a cake walk either"). Von Sothen does a nice job of not just listing culture-clash gags (he works sometimes as a stand-up comic and this style of humor is apparent throughout) but showing the ways in which a person can adapt over time, such as how he vowed to become an "engaged citizen" when Emmanuel Macron was elected president. With self-deprecating humor, von Sothen wonderfully gives an insider's take on living life as an outsider. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
An American in Paris reflects on fantasy and reality.When journalist von Sothen moved to Paris with his pregnant French actress wife, he counted on staying only a few years in the legendary city of beauty and sophistication. Now, 15 years later, he makes his book debut with a deft, shrewd, and entertaining take on his adoptive home, a place far different from how it is conveyed in winsome movies like Amelie and books like Peter Mayle's sun-dappled A Year in Provence. Living in the multiethnic, economically diverse 10th arrondissement, von Sothen has observed at close hand homelessness, vagrancy, crime, and the plight of undocumented immigrants and refugees. Yet his Parisian community has felt safe, without the "palpable aggressiveness" that he sensed on his visits to America. In France, social programs provide for free or subsidized child care; free health care, including a doctor who will come to your home 24 hours a day; a good local public school; and laws that ensure affordable housing even in areas that are being gentrified. Although in some Parisian neighborhoods "streets were cleaner and ruined lives were less in your face," the author prefers the gritty 10th to posh arrondissements that he once assumed were "the embodiment of French wonderfulness." He skewers some of the customs that also once seemed enviable: long, frequent vacations and long, highly choreographed dinner parties. Every six weeks, schools have two-week breaks, during which working parents sign their children up for some extracurricular activity that will occupy themor else depend on grandparents, "flown in like the Army corps of engineers," to supervise. The summer break requires "planning as early as Christmas time" and vacationingsometimes awkwardly"en groupe" with assorted other couples. The presidential race between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen gives the author a chance to ring in on the "disenchantment and disillusionment" of French voters, who, he reports with admiration, "in the end, found their true north."A witty, incisive portrait of contemporary France. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Usually the only child winding his way through the chic parties his parents often hosted in their rambling D.C. brownstone, journalist von Sothen learned early on how to feel at ease while totally out of his league. This comfort in cluelessness, he thinks, serves him well in Paris, where he's lived for 15 years with his French wife and their two children. From his distinctive, insider-outsider perch, he sets out to write against the American ""infatuation with keeping France a quaint and charming dollhouse,"" instead relating the daily humdrum of kid-toting, the changes in his neighborhood and himself after the 2015 terrorist attacks, and the unwritten yet unwavering policies for those famous six weeks of vacances. Von Sothen is both laugh-out-loud funny and tender, the latter especially in poignant essays about his parents, an artist and a newsman, who had him late in life. The problem, if it can be called one, is that even without fantasy, von Sothen's Paris comes across as pretty fantastic, a vibrant, genuine place he clearly feels lucky to call home.--Annie Bostrom Copyright 2019 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
what do you need to know about the places you're going? A dozen new books answer this question in strikingly idiosyncratic ways, wreathing their authors' wanderings in vivid back story - sometimes emotional, sometimes empirical, sometimes imperial - enveloping the reader in a kind of legible Sensurround. These books ought to come with 3-D glasses and a soundtrack. Five years ago, the Manhattanites Erik and Emily Orton, beleaguered but buoyant parents of five children between the ages of 6 and 16, hadn't even plotted an itinerary when they bought a 38-foot catamaran (sight unseen), flew to a Caribbean harbor and set sail on a Swiss-FamilyRobinson-style adventure. "Based on our best budgeting," Erik calculated, "we'd saved enough money to sail for a year. After that we'd be broke." Like her husband, Emily wanted to "pursue a dream so big there was room for my whole family" before their eldest left for college. Their time on the boat would be that dream. Where would they go? They didn't know, but their shipboard byword became, "It Will emerge." In SEVEN AT SEA: Why a New York City Family Cast Off Convention for a Life-Changing Year on a Sailboat (Shadow Mountain, $27.99), husband and wife take turns narrating the story of their voyage, chronicling the crests and troughs of their seaborne experience. Five months in, anchored in Virgin Gorda Sound, they woke to "the blue and green water rolling past, the sun coming up in the east, the trade-wind breeze cooling the morning, the flag flapping." Where would they go next? Anegada? Tortola? Puerto Rico? It would emerge. In THE SALT PATH (Penguin, paper, $17), Raynor Winn and her husband embark on another kind of sea-hugging journey. Theirs will not be on water but alongside it, walking England's rugged South West Coast Path, 630 miles from Somerset to Dorset, battered by rains, blasted by the sun, and shielded from the elements only by a thin tent. Their guide? A 30-year-old book called "Five Hundred Mile Walkies," written by a man named Mark Wallington, who'd undertaken the saunter with his dog. Unlike Wallington, they made this trip not because they wanted to but because they saw no other option. In middle age, they had become homeless as if by thunderclap: In the space of two days, they lost the farmhouse that had provided both their home and their livelihood and learned that Winn's husband had a terminal illness. Not wanting to be a burden on their children or to move into a "soul-destroying" council house, they headed for the path and closed the door behind them. Along the way, passers-by in coastal villages mistook them for drunken tramps and even the birds seemed to jeer at them: "Herring gulls calling daylight calls, tossed up by the air currents, mocked our slow progress." Winn possessed only one assurance: "If I put one foot in front of the other the path would move me forward." Her language makes their arduous trek luminous with the mingled menace and providence of a Hirner painting. "I'm a farmer and a farmer's daughter; the land's in my bones," Winn writes. "I'm cut free from that connection, from the meter of my existence, floating lost and unrooted. But I can still feel it_All material things were slipping away, but in their wake a core of strength was beginning to re-form." During the Raynors' long ramble, British dogs frequently burst through the gorse at awkward moments. But for the doughty park ranger Kristin Knight Pace, dogs are no mere detail; they stand, howling zestfully, in the foreground of her explorations of the Yukon wilderness. In 2016, at the age of 32, she mushed a dog team through the Iditarod, from Anchorage to Nome. This was a remarkable feat for a woman who had arrived in Alaska in tears only seven years earlier, fleeing the breakup of her marriage in Montana by taking a sled-dog-sitting gig in a small mining village near Denali National Park. Her memoir, this much country (Grand Central, $27), retraces her experiences in Alaska, where she remains today, working for the National Park Service and running a kennel with her new husband, whom she met when he helped dig her S.U.V. out of a snowbank the day after her divorce papers landed. By then, her heartbreak had just begun to heal, helped along by a forceful nudge from the dogs. The week before, on a day that reached minus 15 degrees ("a perfect temperature for mushing"), she had hitched the team to a sled unassisted for the first time. The animals "went berserk" with joy when she brought out their harnesses. No sooner had she pulled the quick-release knot than the sled hurtled forward, the dogs yanking her "violently forward into the unknown"; memories of her ex-husband fell off the sled as the team surged ahead, "the sun sinking low in the early afternoon, casting a brilliant orange glow on a frozen lake, silhouetting my dog team as Denali's slopes rise indomitable and massive in the great blue distance." Awe at the wonders of nature revives her confidence: "I have no past, no history. I am this very moment, I am excitement, I am intuition, I am love between a woman and her dogs. I am pure and undiluted. I am the world that surrounds me." Intuition and dogs can also help you get a bead on present-day Russia; Bulgakov's short novel "Heart of a Dog," a satire of Bolshevik officialese, still resonates today. Far more useful, however, is to read in PUTIN'S footsteps: Searching for the Soul of an Empire Across Russia's Eleven Time Zones (St. Martin's, $28.99), Nina Khrushcheva and Jeffrey Tayler's fascinating account of their travels in 2017 between Kamchatka and Kaliningrad. In its pages, you'll learn that you can see China quite clearly from Russia in the harbor city of Blagoveshchensk, six time zones east of Moscow and 500 yards across the Amur River from the Chinese city of Heihe. Ferries transport Chinese and Russian traders back and forth daily. Khrushcheva made that shuttle trip and does not recommend it - the pushing and shoving and rude border control brought her to tears. Khrushcheva (a granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev), who teaches at the New School (as do I, though we've never met), collaborated with Tayler, an American journalist who lives in Moscow and is married to a Russian, to write this book. They were inspired by a suggestion Vladimir Putin floated during the first year of his presidency: that he should fly across the Russian Federation one New Year's Eve, making pit stops at midnight local time in all 11 time zones to "show our nation's greatness, our riches, the diversity of our Mother Russia, our unity, our worth." The authors sample that diversity and report back. Exploring dozens of points along the 6,000-mile-long Trans-Siberian Railway and beyond, they find contemporary evidence of a revival of national pride, not unmixed with habitual Slavic cynicism and resignation. As one contemporary joke they cite goes, "Before you make fun of children who believe in Santa Claus, please remember that there are people who believe that the president and the government take care of them." The double-headed eagle, a czarist symbol suppressed during Soviet times, now replaces the Communist red star in many city squares, along with cult-of-personality-style portraits of Putin. The triumphant cry "Crimea is ours!," referring to Putin's 2014 annexation of Crimea, met the authors in many places, reflecting, they thought, "feelings of insecurity and superiority all at once." Their book delivers a unified impression of a "coherently incoherent" Russia. They bring fresh eyes to cities that usually get too little attention and share fascinating revelations. Who knew that the city of Yakutsk held the world's only woolly mammoth museum, or that its icy river Lena inspired the young Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov to mint his nom de revolution, Lenin? They knew. But nobody knows more than the erudite and entertaining Simon Winder. If you could plug your brain into his, you wouldn't need Google. Then again, your head might explode. After entering the literary fray a dozen years ago with a stirring tribute to James Bond, he hopped the Channel and wrote two volumes of Hapsburg and Teutonic social and political history, "Germania" and "Danubia." Winder now crowns his Continental trilogy with LOTHARINGIA: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30), a book that enfolds a geographic sprawl even a framer of the Almanach de Gotha would be at pains to chart. The title, at least, can be explained. In 814, when the great emperor Charlemagne died, he was notionally the ruler of "everywhere between the Pyrenees and Denmark, the mountains of Bohemia and central Italy." As anyone who has watched (or read) "Game of Thrones" can understand: That's a lot of land to hold onto. In 843, Charlemagne's grandsons split the empire into chunks to give them a better chance at keeping it in the family. Charles 11 took the west, which today is basically France. Louis 1 took the eastern chunk, which today is basically Germany. The third brother, Lothair 1, took the middle, from the North Sea to northern Italy. Lothair f's chunk was still a lot to wrangle, so when he died, his sons divided it further; one took north Italy, one took Provence, and Lothair 11 took everything north of Provence, giving rise to the word "Lotharingia." Today Lotharingia, like a Delphic riddle, is nowhere and everywhere. To give a sense of what a notional map of Lotharingia might look like, Winder supplies the metaphor of a dog that has swallowed a jigsaw puzzle, then thrown it up. To those who say, like Forster, "Only connect," this brilliant and maddening book prompts the thought, "Must we?" Nonetheless, it will make you want to visit several hundred places upon which Winder's discerning, lionizing eye alights. The journalist Alev Scott knows all about the intricacies of Cypriot politics. Though she grew up in England, her mother and grandmother were born in the northern half of Cyprus, an island long divided between Türkey and Greece. In ottoman odyssey: Travels Through a Lost Empire (Pegasus, $27.95), Scott tracks the vine of Turkish influence, "architectural, political and social," that laces through the Levant and the Balkans, finding Turkish words "scattered like Ottoman souvenirs" in the speech of the people. She also encounters physical offshoots - "haunted wooden mosques" in Bulgaria; Turkish flags and a whirling dervish lodge in Bosnia-Herzegovina; TUrkish-speaking car mechanics in Kosovo; and in Serbia, a middle-aged Erdogan fanboy who serves her Turkish cay in a tulip glass. "The Ottomans made us," he tells her. In 2016, Scott made a pilgrimage to Thessaloniki (formerly Salonika) in Greek Macedonia to visit the childhood home of Turkey's founding father, Kemal Atatürk. Afterward, trying to book her flight home to Istanbul, she discovered that her Turkish visa had been suspended, a result of her reporting on Erdogan's crackdowns. Feeling the sting of exile, she moved "masochistically" to the Greek island of Lesbos, where she could see the Turkish coast from the distance. From there, she flew to Lamaca, in Greek Cyprus, and managed to cross the border into Turkish Cyprus. She met Greek holdouts who spoke Turkish; TUrks who spoke Greek. They shared a culture and a landscape, but were powerless to change their borders. "What is 'homeland' - a place or an idea?" Scott asks. "The more 1 traveled, the more powerful and yet obscure 1 found the emotional connection between geography and identity." The power of the connection a person feels with a place can have nothing at all to do with bloodline or citizenship, fn VOLCANOES, PALM TREES, AND PRIVILEGE: Essays on Hawai'i (Overcup, paper, $15.95), Liz Prato, an Oregonian, racks her conscience over the strong attachment she feels to balmy Hawaii. Most visiting American mainlanders throw aside worries about political correctness, seeking only to bask in the sun and surf the indigo sea, accompanied by the plinking of ukuleles. Not Prato. Such uncomplicated pleasureseeking makes her nervous. She first visited the archipelago at 12, soon before her parents' divorce. Scott's father took her and her brother back to Maui countless times; after her parents and her brother died, Hawaii became her refuge. She dreamed of living there, but was afraid of being seen as an interloper. Her book is a rebuke to cultural appropriation, combined with tribute to a place she loves too much to make her own. Italy's isle of Capri owes its cultural heritage to the famous and infamous outsiders who claimed it for their own: emperors and painters, writers and revolutionaries, prodigies and prodigals. Jamie James's splendid history, pagan LIGHT (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28), presents a pageant of these decadent invaders and illustrious exiles: from the Emperor Tiberius to Oscar Wilde and Pablo Neruda. If you read James's book, you will know that you should do more than sail through the narrow entrance of the Blue Grotto: You must hunt down the former Villa Behring, near Capri's main square, where Gorky and Lenin played chess, and seek out the homes of the lesser-known figures of Capri's past, whose rich stories are the true focus of this marvel of nuanced, connected biography. Frances Mayes learned long ago that Italy was her second true home. Indeed, she has lived longer in her villa in Cortona (the subject of her 1996 memoir "Under the Tuscan Sun") than anywhere else, fn see you in the piazza (Crown, $27), she invites ftalophile readers to accompany her and her husband on their visits to out-of-the-way spots. Reading this book is a vacation in itself; it proceeds geographically, not chronologically, pausing in nearly 80 towns and villages in 13 regions so readers can single out chapters that harmonize with their own travel plans. But why take a shortcut, with so many unexpected pleasures to discover? How else would you have known to add the Alto-Adige to your itinerary? There, in the alpine Dolomites, Mayes takes a cable car up a mountainside: "Like the birds, we skim through the larch forest." For Beppe Severgnini, a bona fide, passport-carrying Italian, trains are the preferred mode of travel, "rolling theater, where the scenery and actors change constantly." A train "isn't a vehicle: ft's a place," he explains, a place where talkativeness is "inversely proportional to velocity." fn OFF THE RAILS: A Train Trip Through Life (Berkley, $26), Severgnini reverses down the thousands of miles of tracks he has covered, from Baikal to the Bosphorus and across America and Australia, retrieving memories that emerged along the way. He begins in Washington, D.C., where he lived when he was a foreign correspondent for an Italian newspaper. Twenty years on, he returns with his 20-year-old son, intending to pass along his grand passion for Amtrak via a 5,000-mile ride from Washington, D.C., to Washington State. "Look at America out there," Severgnini enthuses. As Papa rhapsodizes, his son communes with his iPhone, listening in "rapt silence. A little too silent," he realizes. "1 lean over: He's asleep." The American writer John von Sothen crushed out on a more universally recognized source of allure, a beautiful Frenchwoman, whom he met in a bistro in Brooklyn at the turn of the millennium. Soon his love for that woman, Anais, launched him across the Atlantic to Paris, where he remains today, monsieur mediocre: One American Learns the High Art of Being Everyday French (Viking, $25) records his love affair with France and with Anais (whom he married), and his continuing, bumbling attempts to carry off la vie Parisienne with something approaching grace - or, at least, skirting calamity. With Anais in Paris, he bought a disused spice warehouse in a dodgy section of the 10 th Arrondissement and converted it into a cavernous New York-style loft. At the housewarming party, von Sothen committed a flight of faux pas, from cutting the Camembert the wrong way to tucking in to dinner before his wife, the hostess, had raised her fork. All these years later, he has made his peace with his Franco-American improvisations: "fn a land not my own, 1 really could choose my own adventure and aliases." Few places are better than France for trying on new identities. The Australian John Baxter moved to Paris almost 30 years ago in pursuit of a Frenchwoman (what is it about Frenchwomen?), whom he married. Since then, he has written a number of books about his new home. He begins his latest tribute, A YEAR IN PARIS: Season by Season in the City of Light (Harper Perennial, paper, $17.99), with a dreamlike, only-in-France civic action. On an August Sunday in 1990, he woke to find the Champs-Élysées covered with a field of wheat. Farmers had "planted" it to remind the government to value those who work the land. The message was implicit: "Defy them, as Louis XVI had done in 1789, and you risked being handed your head." As Baxter shows, France's republican instinct lives on. fn "A Year in Paris," he strings together the beautiful beads of the French everyday, all held together by the invisible act of imagination that makes a country cohere and endure. LlESL schillinger, a critic and translator, is the author of "Wordbirds: An Irreverent Lexicon for the 21st Century."
Excerpts
Excerpts
Introduction Like many Parisian families, we occasionally rent our apartment out on Airbnb. It's not an easy process, but it is practical, and as long as you can power through the tedious chore of prepping your house and fielding calls from guests who forgot the code to your building, it does provide some disposable income that's handy for all those school year vacations that pop up in France like measles every six weeks. What many Parisian families DO NOT do is rent out their apartment while they're not on vacation and when their kids are still in school, which is exactly what we did one year by accident, forgetting that the Easter break for families in the south of France hits a week earlier than that in Paris. We realized this fun fact days before our guests arrived, which sent us scrambling to find alternative lodging (on Airbnb of course) in Montmartre, a hop skip and another hop away from our own place in the Tenth Arrondissement. Sure, it felt odd to pack up our clothes, the printer, plus the dog and cat, hair dryers and book bags, just to hoof it three metro stops west for a week. And yes, it was a bit bizarre to pass your own apartment in the morning on your way to school (now a twenty‑minute schlep) and see the window of your bathroom fogged up from a stranger probably fucking in your shower. But in the end, the week turned out not half bad. It forced my family to break up a rut we didn't know we were in, and gave us the chance to see a part of Paris we hadn't had time to visit much. And it was during this impromptu staycation in Montmartre, dining out early with the kids at restaurants or ducking into a café for a beer midday or riding the bus (the bus?) and taking photos from the window of that bus, that I felt, for the first time in fifteen years, like an American in Paris. A tad curious, kind of stupid, and with much too much energy, not unlike the other Americans I saw in Montmartre that week, marching up single file to the Sacré Coeur church, where they'd take in a breathtaking view of Paris while also being pickpocketed. Some were backpackers on Snapchat, others were orthopedic‑shoed retirees carrying on about Sedona. And although each looked winded and footsore, each had an enthusiasm for Paris I hadn't felt in a long time. How could they not? Although it was now a bit Disney‑fied, Montmatre had been the foothold for artists like Picasso and Modigliani and American expat writers like Langston Hughes, and its allure and romance were still potent. The streets were cobblestone and smoothed by time. Chickens turned on those sidewalk rotisseries. People leaned on flipped‑over wine casks smacking back oysters and Muscadet. I myself probably rounded out the cliché, a real‑life Parisian writer in his peacoat and five‑day‑old scruff scribbling in his Moleskine what the world would never understand but which had to be written. Little did these tourists know, I was just as lost as them, and had they'd asked me in their X‑KUSAY MOI MESSSUR French where the Moulin Rouge was, or in which restaurant Picasso traded his paintings for meals, I couldn't have helped. Because as a Parisian, I wouldn't be caught dead at any of them. Yet at the same time it burned me how I'd lost the innocence for this place. I'd strayed so far off the range and gone so deep into the recesses of French life that Montmartre now seemed Vegas to me. Before I knew it, the week was over and I was back in my own Paris, a grafittied, kebab‑standed, trash‑strewn enclave near the Gare du Nord, feeling as if I'd just had an affair with another neighborhood. And like any cheater, I immediately tried to mask my guilt by finding fault with my present home. "Didn't it feel nice to just sit outside and hear that accordion play?" I'd mention to my wife, Anaïs. I'd go on and on, harping about the cakes in the windows and the antique dealers, telling Anaïs what a relief it was to not hear sirens or to not have my conscience weighed down as I consider the circumstances of the refugees we pass every day on the way to the subway. (Yes, we've had refugee camps in the Tenth--probably because we didn't try to evict them as other arrondissements have done.) But in my comparisons, I missed that our own Bohemian digs aren't all that much different from what Montmartre had been back in the day. Anaïs knows this though, and she's keen enough to see how attached I actually am to our place. She even coined an expression--she claims she made it up, but it sounds too profound for that to be true --"On critique bien, ce qu'on aime le mieux." (We critique best what we love the most.) She's right. I love my adoptive home; so much so, I feel I'm entitled now to flame it à la Française. Yet what I'm zinging isn't the French institutions themselves, but the Instagram version we Americans have imposed upon them. Within every best‑selling book about France, there's no doubt love, but it's always been on our terms and one‑way. We have this infatua‑ tion with keeping France a quaint and charming dollhouse. If the vi‑ sion isn't forged by Impressionist paintings, it's forged by cantankerous civil servants who strike on a daily basis or farmhouses basking in lavender fields or a workplace where emails after 5:00 p.m. aren't opened. If it's not warm baguettes and good wine, it's angelic kids in Bon Point standing next to chic and severe mothers who don't get fat. According to these best sellers, France isn't on the cusp of anything. It's in the preservation business, keeping civilization alive while the rest of the world goes to Best Buy. When I moved here fifteen years ago, I, too, was under the spell of a rose‑colored France. I had in my head that I'd be eating six‑course dinners while vacationing three months a year with my French actress wife, all while promenading down the Seine with gloves and walking stick. The reality has proven quite different. But not in a bad way, just in a real‑life, run‑of‑the‑mill, everyday (let's say mediocre) way that anybody who's working and raising kids, walking dogs, trying to get the Internet installed, paying a mortgage, and struggling to help with homework he himself doesn't understand can relate to. For me, Paris is a mess, a confusing, roiling, weird place. If any‑ thing, it's America now with its Supreme T‑shirt pop‑up sales and cupcake parlors and hoverboards and Google stores that looks clean and vanilla and safe. Anytime I'm back in New York for work, it's me who takes on the clueless glaze of those Montmartre backpackers, wondering how the deli I used to buy forty ounces at suddenly became an office building or why everyone feels obliged now to crank the AC in March. I'll question why Amtrak can't modernize, or how I missed the whole sippy cup craze, and it's during these ruminations that I real‑ ize what the person across from me has pegged me for--everyday Eurotrash. My life in France, I tell my friends, is a lot like going back in time to the United States in the seventies, when the cities were rugged, cap gains were high, public schools were still doable, economic growth was minimal, people drank at lunch, and the national fabric and social net were intact, warts and all. When my American friends visit and I tell them this, I see there's a slight twinkle of newfound romance for France, based on a new set of criteria. There's also relief. France, the way I pitch it, isn't perfect at all. And because of that, it's accessible and, for the most part, English speaking, just like the rest of the world. Sure the Brie, Bordeaux, and baguette thing still exists, but it doesn't define our life here. Plus those are things you can easily find in Man‑ hattan or Mumbai or Berkeley as well. What you can't find though is a Doctor Benayoun who comes to my house at midnight to give me a flu shot raving about Miami and how we should go in on a condo together; or the professor I see when I walk my dog each night teaching French on his off time from a paper board in the cold rain to Syrian refugees camped in our park. Nor can you find my aristocrat father‑in‑law, who has two children my own children's ages and who has no qualms about asking me to babysit. Enduring love, I've learned, is when you're smitten by something or someone for one reason, but you end up loyal to them for another. Since our Montmartre staycation five years ago, we've made it a point each year to recreate it. We rent out our place during a work/ school week, throw together the suitcases and dog food and book bags and staplers, and live for a few days somewhere else in Paris. We 've done Bastille. We've done Le Marais. And this year we're venturing out to the no man's land of the Fifteenth. And just as with our time in Montmartre, we'll admire the scenes or walk the Seine or check out a museum. Hell, we might even buy souvenirs. And in doing so, I'll once again feel like someone in the audience eating popcorn as he watches the stage production of " Paris !!" Invariably the clock will strike twelve and we'll return home, hop‑ ing the lucky family staying in our apartment had as much fun as we did. But judging from our Airbnb reviews, the compliments usually stop at the size of our loft. Most are a litany of masked disappointments. The bathroom towels were worn out, or they didn't exactly love the street, the neighborhood was a bit too noisy and rough, a bit off the beaten trail. Our home in the Tenth wasn't the Paris they thought they'd be visiting, at least not the one featured in all those books they'd bought at the airport. And in reading the feedback out loud in English to my cackling family and puzzled dog, I realize now how far from home an American can feel when he says in a perfectly accented French huff . . . "Ooh la la . . . les Américains! Excerpted from Monsieur Mediocre: One Man's Journey to Becoming Real French by John von Sothen All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.Table of Contents
Introduction | p. xi |
The Art of the Unfortunate Event | p. 1 |
She Had Me at Bah | p. 17 |
The Aristocrats | p. 43 |
Bringing Up Bibi | p. 61 |
Six Weeks of Not So Great Time Off | p. 85 |
Letter from the No-Go Zone | p. 107 |
Huge in France | p. 127 |
Voulez-Vous Think Tank Avec Moi? | p. 145 |
Wesh We Can | p. 157 |
Will You Be My French Friend? | p. 177 |
Years and Years and Years in Normandy | p. 201 |
The French Resistant | p. 225 |
There's No Place Like Chez Moi | p. 247 |
Acknowledgments | p. 267 |