Daily Blague

At the museum on Friday, I picked up a copy of Diane Johnson's Into a Paris Quartier (National Geographic, 2005). Ms Johnson and her husband spend half of every year in France; currently, she's living on Rue Bonaparte in the Sixième, just up the street from St-Germain-des-Prés and around the corner from the Institut de France. Rashly or not, she provides her street address, and I have to wonder if this will lead to inconvenience, as there are doubtless many Le Divorce-clutching Americans who would love to attend an impromptu book signing at the author's front door.

Much of the pleasure of this book comes from its narrative voice, which is quite unlike that of Ms Johnson's fictional omniscient observers. In her novels, Ms Johnson underlines her American protagonists' blunders with a voice that sounds almost incapable of error. You will learn things about French life from Ms Johnson's novels, useful things. Ms Johnson herself has already learned them. In a Paris Quartier is stuffed to the twelve-foot ceilings with things that Ms Johnson doesn't know. I wasn't surprised to learn that she had never heard of the académicien into whose apartment she stumbled on a househunting expedition, but I was very surprised indeed to learn that, having discovered that she really loved reading the man's novels, that, indeed, he has become her favorite French novelist, she reads him in English, not French, because reading in French slows her down. Hearing this, I felt something like Dorothy upon meeting the Wonderful Wizard. Reading in foreign languages is bound to be slower for all but the truly bilingual, but I soldier on because I don't really believe in translation. Ms Johnson does, however, and more power to her. I found the admission mightily endearing.

Continue reading about Into a Paris Quartier at Portico.