Customer Reviews

French Lessons: A Memoir

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It is said when the student is ready the teacher will appear, and for me this has always been the case. Having first studied Latin and Spanish, I finally arrived at a point in my life where I wanted to learn French. Suddenly, everything seemed to facilitate my efforts. My job enabled me to travel to France, I discovered my new colleague was a French tutor in his spare time, and one day I found this little book.

Imagine a story about learning a language that holds your interest as the momentum builds until suddenly you reach the climax -- the sounding of the perfect French "R". Those who've worked and worked at learning a language can appreciate the moment. But this book is not just about reaching the perfect French "R" it's about coming of age.

The writer is a professor of French Literature at Duke University who says she found her own voice through the learning of another language--French. But before she did that, she was a young girl living in America who was the daughter of a man who took part in the Trials at Nuremberg. And, she had a Jewish grandmother who spoke to her in Yiddish.

Alice Kaplan's autobiography of her early years in America and France and her recollected memories of her parents and grandparents, especially her father and her grandmother are haunting.

This is a book about learning to speak French almost perfectly, and it uses this process - learning French - as a complicated metaphor for something else entirely. I wasn't quite sure what, exactly, but it evidently has to do with switching languages as a way to fiddle with or tune up or peer in upon repressed memories: Individual memories, national memories, the author's personal memories.

In other words, this is a book about How to Learn French in the same way that Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Mechanics was a book about How to Fix Your Motorcycle. You could learn from Zen, etc., how to change your spark plugs, yes, but it was a book about living with schizophrenia. Similarly, you can learn a lot of French grammar from French Lessons, but it is a book about living with death. It is nevertheless cheerful.

She writes brilliantly, with wonderful turns of phrase that make you smile again and again as you read. "... the push and pull of conversation," for example. Or, following a highly physical description of a new boyfriend, she appends: "He was a moralist and had theories."

The subjunctive is a tense that has been largely lost from English but survives in French to help express obligation, doubt, uncertainty, sentiment, desire, possibility, impossibility, etc. She observes that we live most of our lives in the subjunctive.

She makes sense, in English, of three past tenses of French verbs (the passe simple, the passe compose and the imparfait). Her explanation will stick with you --- practical and excellent help for a student of French. But it is also a demonstration of her special gift for, and evident obsession with, timelines, history, and the suddenness of terrible things.

Every now and then the book goes straight out of control. It includes long winded ego trips, academic winks and nudges, other stuff that was evidently written into the book to be read by specific readers who knew her personally. But you can spot and skip these passages easily enough.

When she stays on the bicycle she is just terrific. I look forward to reading her more recent book.

a friend of mine lent me this book while i was writing my senior thesis on contemporary french history. although i should have been researching and translating my sources, this book introduced me to a kindred spirit. through the author's memories, my own sentiments surrounding france, literature and language acquisition were echoed by her story. this is a must-read for anyone who isn't french, but is still homesick for france.

I read this book when it first came out and again this last week. What I find remarkable is not so much Kaplan's fascination with fascism, but the ways that she ferrets out much of what is at work in the personality of the academic and the way that she explains my own fascination with a foreign culture (for me it's Germany) and learning a foreign language: the strangeness of finding basic affirmation in something so ultimately different from one's own circumstances. She also has a healthy distance from academia, which I wish more academics had.

I wish I had started this book sooner. I quickly put it ahead of everthing else I was doing, including lesson plans for my Spanish classes. Kaplan writes very convincingly and vividly about living in France and Switzerland while learning French. She has a family story to tell and she weaves in so many important elements that create an emotional ending. I relived so many of my own experiences living and learning Spanish while I read her stories. She helped me put lots of memories into some more simpler order that had escaped me for years. Merci.

Kaplan has written a beautifully crafted memoir documenting her escape into French and French literature; about the motives for that escape, its difficulties, and the places where it took her, including home again. The childhood memories of loss and lonliness are moving, but equally vital are the accounts of intellectual growing up at Yale and the incredible interview with a fascist apologist.

This is a beautiful book.

My first reaction to reading it was envy: Envy that her family had the means to send her to a Swiss boarding school to absorb French language and culture. Envy that she has been able to devote her professional life to the study of such a beautiful and absorbing subject. And envy at the precision of her language, and the equal precision of her insight into herself. She is a very intelligent and strong-willed person, but she isn't arrogant. She seems to appreciate that her relationship with the French language is a gift, and she has done her best to use it well. I'm sure she is an excellent teacher, compassionate and understanding of her students. By the end of the book, I came to realize that she has had her share of pain, loneliness, and unhappiness, just like all the rest of us. But I still envy her.

The author's relationship with the French language is, as one might expect, complicated. As she tells us how she came to be a teacher of French, we learn much else: Of her childhood, her father and his premature death, and its effect on her; of her first immersion in the French language at a Swiss boarding school; of her boyfriends, her cigarette smoking, her willfulness and her anger. We also learn about the relationship between post-WWII French politics and the literature of the French fascists, of Louis-Ferdinand Celine, and also Drieu La Rochelle, Bardeche, and Brasillach. We learn about her experiences with Paul de Man at Yale, her disillusion when he was exposed as having been a Nazi sympathizer during the war. We learn of her experiences teaching the Capretz method, and of her search for the perfect French "r".

This complicated story is told with great economy and precision, as one would expect of someone who has spent her adult life immersed in French language and literature. Her style is completely lucid and transparent. Her descriptions flow off the page seamlessly into the mind's eye. And although we learn quite a lot about the author, we learn only as much as we need to know in order to understand how she came to teach French, and no more. In this she is very French.

So far as I can tell, there is no French translation of "French Lessons", although Kaplan's book on the Brasillach trial has been translated. I would guess that "French Lessons" would be very difficult to translate adequately into French.

I was loaned this book when living in France and the book relieved me of much of my difficulties being there. Many readers will be attracted to this book because of their homesickness for France or because of other symptoms of Francophilia. While I lived and worked there, I did not especially like Paris or the French people I met in public, although some individuals were quite nice. I didn't feel that people there were especially anti-American or anything, just that they were cold and closed (it was Paris, after all). I felt alienated and understood too much of what was going on in some areas (like politics, the news, the psychotic/alcoholic relationship my roommate had with his girlfriend) but without access to more positive private spheres(just as some Europeans I have met assume they understand people from the US without really understanding). Kaplan's careful and warmly ironic discussion of her experiences in the Francophone world and that particular moment in history helped me suddenly frame my experience in terms of common themes and differences with her own work. I was personally relieved and engrossed, a rare experience for me with biography of any sort.

Reading _French Lessons_ opened a whole new world to me and on the experiences I was having. Kaplan's autobiography is reflective and self-aware, even self-critical at times and reveals the author's struggle with the seduction and domination she experienced at the hands of the French language and her path to a kind of liberation without distancing. This led to her choosing a difficult topic, the literature of French fascism (still a difficult and unpleasant topic in France today) and the difficult task of positioning herself as an outsider interested in what many French people would consider to be the nation's dirty laundry.

The intellectual history she covers in the second part of the book has been important to many and I hope that readers do not simply flip through. She is a professor without being professorly and has something to teach--her approach to the topic she chose, which she describes in the book is just as much a reflection on the nature of inquiry and one's position in relation to it as the earlier experiences of childhood and adolescence she details. While some readers may choose to view this section as "ego ravings" or "digression," they are choosing to disregard her musings over her professional training--which I would bet they would not do if she were not an academic. I strongly and wholeheartedly recommend this book as a good read, as a brilliant and warm reflection on this woman's work and life.

This is a lovely memoir about a love affair with a foreign language, culture and country. The author's father died when she was eight. She began to fill the gap he left in her life by gradually mastering the difficult French language. She describes her long voyage in terms that anyone who has tried to completely master a foreign language and culture can understand. I had a similar experience myself learning Hebrew.
There is the breakthrough moment when she finally manages to say the French 'r' correctly.; the long friendship with a French family in Bordeux; the sleazy French boyfriend; finally her doctoral studies into the nature of French fascism and anti-Semitism which connect directly to her father's work as a prosecutor at the Nuremburg tribunal.
It is strange the way peoiple can discard the identity that is already theirs' through family, history and upbringing (in this author's case, she seems fairly indifferent to her Jewishness, but perhaps that is unjust) and seek a new identity elsewhere.
But that is a minor quibble. The writing is simple and direct and the issues are profound. This is about a struggle for identity. The account of academic wars was less interesting but ultimately I found myself quite involved and occasionally moved by the story.
For more about me and my take on identity, go to The Nazi Hunter: A Novel

This book was a textbook in preparation for a study abroad trip to France. In many ways I could relate to the author. In particular, I too lost a parent suddenly and unexpectedly when I was young. I too (for different reasons) ended up living in France, learning French, and falling hopelessly in love with it (as well as the people and many aspects of the culture; however, I'm a linguist at heart). Because of this, much of what she wrote about her life experiences, her love of and need for French, rang true to me. I was profoundly grateful to her for giving me the words and concepts necessary to understand myself and the world around me better. On the other hand, I found her intellectual approach to life difficult to handle. I appreciate the intellectual side of life, but there's a point when it becomes too excessive and all-controlling. At times I felt she slipped over into this too much. For example, her experiences in French graduate work convinced me almost single-handedly NOT to study French after my bachelor's degree. All in all, I would recommend this book to someone who is already in love with France, French, and the French. Otherwise it may come across as overly intellectual and of little interest.