21,000+ Reviews
Bookshop.org has the highest-rated customer service of any bookstore in the world
Description
America and France have always had a special relationship. In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the two have enjoyed a love affair of sorts, with all the love/hate dynamics that suggests. From Benjamin Franklin charming Louis XVI to Jackie Kennedy enchanting Charles de Gaulle, the two peoples have fascinated and repelled each other. Mary Blume has cultivated her own love affair with this often inscrutable land -- France.
It is an affair that spans more than thirty years, from the time Mary Blume first came to Paris, beginning her renowned columns in the International Herald Tribune with a fine eye for the charms, and no aversion to skewering the pretensions, of her adopted home. As with the best chronicles of a time and a place, the narrator begins to emerge through the text. Only Mary Blume could have written these essays. Hers is a unique voice that has won her a devoted audience who have turned religiously, over decades, to her weekend features.
Quintessentially American, she has managed that fine trick of not assimilating, and yet coming to know, in the fullest sense, the place and the people in all their often sublime and sometimes ridiculous complexity. In the pieces themselves, whether she turns her penetrating lens on Frenchemen or their money or their socks, whether a bearded lady or Simone de Beauvoir, street performers or members of the Académie Française, whether the newest chic potato or the eternally chic St. Germain de Prés, whether the events of May '68 or the last presidential elections, she sees what would pass unseen -- were she not there to notice it.
In the simplest things, Mary Blume reveals the telling detail. In a piece ostensibly about cooking lessons given by two well-meaning aristocrats, she lays bare the acute French sense of class; in a deadpan explanation of the byzantine process of changing street names, she captures the Kafkaesque French bureaucracy; in looking at one beloved Left Bank bistro, she gives us the essence of every such restaurant; by describing the French art of window shopping, she gives us a reflection of how the French see themselves. Whether plumbing the nuances of their language, their rites, rules, or rituals; whether looking at the Mona Lisa or the political arena, film-makers or winemakers, the places and personalities come alive with an uncanny ring of truth.
Illustrated by Ronald Searle with the unique wit and delicacy for which he is world famous, A French Affair gives us not only a unique perspective on a time, a place, and a people, but a France that we can digest, distill, and revisit without ever leaving the comfort of home.
It is an affair that spans more than thirty years, from the time Mary Blume first came to Paris, beginning her renowned columns in the International Herald Tribune with a fine eye for the charms, and no aversion to skewering the pretensions, of her adopted home. As with the best chronicles of a time and a place, the narrator begins to emerge through the text. Only Mary Blume could have written these essays. Hers is a unique voice that has won her a devoted audience who have turned religiously, over decades, to her weekend features.
Quintessentially American, she has managed that fine trick of not assimilating, and yet coming to know, in the fullest sense, the place and the people in all their often sublime and sometimes ridiculous complexity. In the pieces themselves, whether she turns her penetrating lens on Frenchemen or their money or their socks, whether a bearded lady or Simone de Beauvoir, street performers or members of the Académie Française, whether the newest chic potato or the eternally chic St. Germain de Prés, whether the events of May '68 or the last presidential elections, she sees what would pass unseen -- were she not there to notice it.
In the simplest things, Mary Blume reveals the telling detail. In a piece ostensibly about cooking lessons given by two well-meaning aristocrats, she lays bare the acute French sense of class; in a deadpan explanation of the byzantine process of changing street names, she captures the Kafkaesque French bureaucracy; in looking at one beloved Left Bank bistro, she gives us the essence of every such restaurant; by describing the French art of window shopping, she gives us a reflection of how the French see themselves. Whether plumbing the nuances of their language, their rites, rules, or rituals; whether looking at the Mona Lisa or the political arena, film-makers or winemakers, the places and personalities come alive with an uncanny ring of truth.
Illustrated by Ronald Searle with the unique wit and delicacy for which he is world famous, A French Affair gives us not only a unique perspective on a time, a place, and a people, but a France that we can digest, distill, and revisit without ever leaving the comfort of home.
Product Details
| Publisher | Free Press |
| Publish Date | November 05, 1999 |
| Pages | 304 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Digital (delivered electronically) |
| EAN/UPC | 9781439136386 |
About the Author
Mary Blume is a columnist at the International Herald Tribune and author of Côte d'Azur: Inventing the French Riviera. Born, raised, and educated in New York City, she lives in Paris, France.
Reviews
Ward Just author of A Dangerous Friend A stunning book. Anyone who loves Paris, or who loves someone who loves Paris, or who knows someone who loathes Paris, will treasure A French Affair, the product of thirty-five years of close embrace between a writer and her city. It's witty, unsentimental, wise in unexpected ways, caustic when it needs to be -- in other words, utterly faithful to its subject.
Gore Vidal The wit and sharp eye of Mary Blume have made the French accessible, if not credible, to those who read her in the International Herald Tribune, and rather like Nabokov with butterflies, she pins her specimens to the page in full color, as it were, and we see that what we took to be moths, Beauvoir and Duras, have as many colors as such Standard Admirals as Sartre or Arletty.
Jane Kramer European correspondent, The New Yorker Mary Blume writes like an angel and thinks like a devil -- which the French will tell you is the hallmark of a civilized mind. Reading Blume, I like to imagine Montaigne or Montesquieu curled up somewhere with the same story and a glass of, say, Diamond Creek cabernet, savoring both, trusting both, enchanted to discover that the new world of their dark and most exotic fantasies had finally produced such remarkably kindred clarity and style. Blume is the one American writing in Paris who comes anywhere close to the great essayist tradition that once defined the culture but that most native Parisians have in fact lost -- one that proceeds from wit, wisdom, erudition, and above all from an understanding that the deepest ironies are gentle, and amount to an embrace that includes us all, in our folly, faults, and poignant, blundering affectation.
Sir Peter Ustinov I dote on Mary Blume. She is one of that sacred battalion of Americans who cultivated a love affair with France at a time when it produced a cultural harvest of immeasurable wealth to both countries. I recognize a kindred spirit in her, inquisitive in the best sense of the word, crackling with intelligence, graceful and literate.
Gore Vidal The wit and sharp eye of Mary Blume have made the French accessible, if not credible, to those who read her in the International Herald Tribune, and rather like Nabokov with butterflies, she pins her specimens to the page in full color, as it were, and we see that what we took to be moths, Beauvoir and Duras, have as many colors as such Standard Admirals as Sartre or Arletty.
Jane Kramer European correspondent, The New Yorker Mary Blume writes like an angel and thinks like a devil -- which the French will tell you is the hallmark of a civilized mind. Reading Blume, I like to imagine Montaigne or Montesquieu curled up somewhere with the same story and a glass of, say, Diamond Creek cabernet, savoring both, trusting both, enchanted to discover that the new world of their dark and most exotic fantasies had finally produced such remarkably kindred clarity and style. Blume is the one American writing in Paris who comes anywhere close to the great essayist tradition that once defined the culture but that most native Parisians have in fact lost -- one that proceeds from wit, wisdom, erudition, and above all from an understanding that the deepest ironies are gentle, and amount to an embrace that includes us all, in our folly, faults, and poignant, blundering affectation.
Sir Peter Ustinov I dote on Mary Blume. She is one of that sacred battalion of Americans who cultivated a love affair with France at a time when it produced a cultural harvest of immeasurable wealth to both countries. I recognize a kindred spirit in her, inquisitive in the best sense of the word, crackling with intelligence, graceful and literate.
Earn by promoting books
Earn money by sharing your favorite books through our Affiliate program.
Become an affiliate
