From Publishers Weekly
Powers (editor of Italy in Mind and Ireland in Mind) does France in this collection of 33 letters, works of fiction and essays by British and American authors. The pieces stretch from the early 18th century to the present, but the omission of dates for some entries is frustrating. Dated or undated, itemized descriptions of sky, sea, vegetation and cathedrals can make for dry reading, as in the selections by Henry James and Ezra Pound. By contrast, the juiciest entries convey how being in that sensual country stamps out the conventions travelers sometimes bring. Most evocative are Adam Gopnik's excerpt from Paris to the Moon, which uses his wife's prenatal care in France to contrast cultural attitudes toward pregnancy, sex, parenthood and doctor's fashions; Ernest Hemingway's vignette of a starving writer's hunger from A Moveable Feast; David Sedaris's tale from Me Talk Pretty One Day, on the exasperation of learning to communicate in French; and, of course, the requisite Peter Mayle-who inspired so many to visit Provence that he himself had to flee-from A Year in Provence, on getting used to the French social ritual of kissing on the cheek. Earlier writings describing the desperation of poor Parisians before the French Revolution-Charles Dickens's broken wine cask scene from A Tale of Two Cities and Thomas Jefferson's 1780 letter to James Madison concerning his encounter with a destitute woman-do much to illustrate that era. A common thread runs throughout this mostly pleasant collection: as Powers puts it, "travelers in France are heavily freighted with the weight of home."
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
It seems to be a rite of passage for Anglophone authors: go to France and write about it. Americans and Brits have been going for centuries, as the selections in this anthology, with essays by such authors as Charles Dickens, Henry Adams, Joanne Harris, and Mary McCarthy, prove. There is enough variety in the collection that nearly everyone should find something to pique his or her interest, from reflections by Americans on France at a time when the U.S. was quite new, to Lost Generation musings by Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, to the wry humor of such contemporary writers as Adam Gopnik and David Sedaris. Editor Powers has included fiction and nonfiction, as well as two poems ("Avignon" by Lawrence Durrell and "Place Pigalle" by Richard Wilbur), and, as she notes in the introduction, made a conscious effort to feature selections from every area of France, not just Paris. The result is a delight to read for anyone in love with France and offers an invitation to seek out the sources of these selections for further reading.
Beth LeistensniderCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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