French Lessons: A Memoir

by Alice Kaplan

Book Overview

Brilliantly uniting the personal and the critical, French Lessons is a powerful autobiographical experiment. It tells the story of an American woman escaping into the French language and of a scholar and teacher coming to grips with her history of learning. Kaplan begins with a distinctly American quest for an imaginary France of the intelligence. But soon her infatuation with all things French comes up against the dark, unimagined recesses...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226424197
• ISBN13: 9780226424194
• Release Date: October 1994
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 232 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

reflection on self and otherness through language....

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.

A helpful book, and a bit of a puzzle, too.

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.

Explains my own raison d'etre

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.

A beautifully crafted memoir about life in two languages.

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.