Salut! has a noble tradition of getting round to writing about books years, even decades, after they appeared.
Since Laura Florand, a Francophile and swottily French-speaking American academic, published her first book, Blame it on Paris, she has produced a string of bestsellers**. Her later works include The Chocolate Heart and The Chocolate Temptation (Amour et Chocolat) and doubtless others having nothing to do with cocoa; she also holds down a job in the romance faculty - calm down, it means languages - at Duke University, North Carolina.
But I am concerned with the debut.
And what we get in it is raw Florand, a story that passes itself off as fiction but self-evidently draws on a wealth of real people and experiences, from a time when the author was not a success but struggling to build a life with her French lover, later husband, and not even sure which side of the Atlantic that life should be.
Had it been purely a work of fiction, I would not have enjoyed it as much as I did. The realisation that she was certainly describing at least some of the book's cast, because she knew them, made it an entertaining and also friendly read.
If the mark of a good book is that you form strong views, mostly favourable, of its characters, and miss them when the last page has been turned, Blame it on Paris finds the target.
It also helps, of course, to be able to identify with those people and events. I have that reader's advantage.
Florand makes much of the four marriages she went through with her Sébastien. This was not because they kept falling out of love, and then back in again; they had civil weddings and church blessings in each of their countries. Monsieur et Madame Salut managed only two, register office in County Durham followed by l'Eglise Sainte-Jeanne-d'Arc - where else would an Englishman choose to demonstrate his country's love of the French? - in Le Mans. I thought we had made it three, with a visit to the town hall in France, but have been sharply corrected on that point.
Florard's description of the preparations for each ceremony, and the occasions themselves, are rich in detail, character observation and humour. She is strong on the battles with bureaucracy she faced in Paris and Sébastien in her own native, redneckish Georgia.
Another clue to the actual existence of the people we meet in the book is Florand's very French habit of pointedly not identifying them all by their full names. This may have been a device to avoid infringing their droit de vie privée or because she had not drawn a veil over their foibles and did not wish to cause offence. But she uses a long dash even to disguise her own maiden name (Laura H______), which seemed prissily unAmerican.
From this, I have concluded, perhaps mistakenly, that she invented at least one of the novel's inhabitants, her eldest brother David, since his feelings are not spared at all.
Describing the approach to introducing Sébastien to her family in the rural, rough-and-ready, Republican south - and not Republican in the French sense - Florand says:
".. [he] was going to think my family was a horde of barbarians. My oldest brother was a horde of barbarians in and of himself ..."
It is a lovely line, But if David and his siblings do exist, they should tell us how much Laura paid for their acquiescence.
Florand is also good on being down and nearly out in Paris, on her real or fictional weakness for tantrums - not many, but they can be spectacular - and on the gulf that stretches out from French to US culture. I found the attempts to portray herself as essentially zany a little unconvincing because this is clearly a clever, resourceful woman with her head screwed on comme il faut. I naturally resent her easy grasp of one foreign language, though am not too bothered that it is only one of those she has mastered.
At times, when I forgot it was theoretically a novel, the extensive and directly quoted dialogue was a little jarring. Those were the moments I felt myself hoping the book would soon be over.
Usually when I think such a thing, I just put the book down and move on to another (you should see the library I liberated from the Paris bureau of The Daily Telegraph, that paper's management not caring what I did with the contents of the apartement de fonction, proudly overlooking the Tuileries, after deciding to do away with it).
But I resisted the temptation to put down Blame it on Paris and I am glad I did. Instead I read every word and now put it up there with Sarah Turnbull's Almost French as a non-essential but warmly compelling account of Anglo-Saxon efforts to reach out to the Gallic nation. And yes, you do encounter the odd mention of chocaholicism.
* Buy Laura Florand's books by going to the Salut! Amazon link http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0765315084/salusund-21 and navigating from there. Same applies to Sarah Turnbull: http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B004QGXP1K/salusund-21
** Laura H________ or Florand can be found at http://lauraflorand.com/, @LauraFlorand and at Facebook.
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