Life at the Cafe Berlitz: A Memoir of Paris

by Mardiyah A. Tarantino

Life at the Cafe Berlitz is about the other expatriates who lived in Paris in the 50s. These quirky and colorful characters - the impoverished Portuguese marquis, the Maori Latin teacher, and the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1932672591
• ISBN13: 9781932672596
• Release Date: December 2004
• Publisher: Outskirts Press
• Length: 180 Pages
• Weight: 0.53 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

LIFE AT THE CAFE BERLITZ

LIFE AT THE CAFÉ BERLITZ (614 words) Once a year I make a pilgrimage to a little cafe in a seaside town about an hour's drive away from where I live. There I ritually consume a huge piece of passionfruit sponge cake, the best passionfruit sponge cake I have yet discovered in my sojourn on this planet. This year I took with me to the ceremony Mardiyah Tarantino's book Life at the Cafe Berlitz. I found a sunny corner at the cafe and along with the cake, I consumed quite a lot of her book. It is a book which is ideally read at a favourite cafe, although of course you are also free to read it at home or on the train. Wherever you read it, I'm sure you'll be delighted by it. The book tells the story of about nine months in Mardiyah's life while she was living in Paris in the 1950s and keeping body and soul together by teaching at the Berlitz language school. The nine-month period is no accident since the book coincides more or less with the story of her first pregnancy. Since she was unwed at the time, she had a number of male protectors, her "bodyguards", her colleagues at the language school. Some famous names are mentioned. Brendan Behan came to visit one night at the flat that Mardiyah shared with an Irish roommate. He was so taken by one of Mardiyah's sayings - "A home is not a home unless it has a snake" - that he said he was going to use it in one of his books. There are also memories of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas when he stayed at Mardiyah's parents house during his famous reading tour of the United States. He did not eat the excellent food prepared by Mardiyah's mum, preferring to get drunk instead. And at a book launch, Picasso held Mardiyah's eyes in a penetrating stare But mostly of the book is about her interactions with the more obscure bodyguards at their favourite cafe, the Cafe Berlitz. The bodyguards are a somewhat eccentric collection including Donald who is part Maori and loves mountaineering, Camelo who is a Portuguese aristocrat down on his luck; and Gilbert, a disgraced Oxford Don. The book is full of the sights, sounds and smells of Paris. This is an authentic, funky Paris which if it still exists at all, is no doubt very hard to find these days. We also find out all kinds of interesting things about Mardiyah. Did you know that she was once part of a belly dance troupe? Or that she came to Paris to study theatre but unfortunately found herself typecast as a "perverse ingénue". Apparently in the rather rigid French theatre of that time, once you were typecast, you could not get any other kind of role, which blocked Mardiyah's career, since there was not a lot of call for "perverse ingénues". She eventually became a sociologist instead, A few dark tones are hinted at in the book. It is set against the background of the Algerian War when the French Army regularly used torture, and also the general strike which paralysed France for several months. Towards the end of the book, the girlfriend of one of the