Almost French by Sarah Turnbull

Unlike a lot of us, including those of us that participate in the Paris In July event, freelance journalist Sarah Turnbull wasn’t all that desperate to visit France when she was spending a year backpacking through Europe back in the mid 90s. She was mainly spending her time in the eastern European countries. In her travels, she meets a French lawyer named Frederic a couple of times and when he asks her to come and visit him in Paris, she agrees.

What starts out as a week long visit turns into a month long holiday affair and then into more and, after a brief separation while Sarah finishes her travels, she moves to Paris to be with Fred. Moving to a different country requires adjustments for anyone, let alone when there is a different language and very different cultural values involved. For a relatively laid back Aussie, the rules that permeate French society are difficult to understand let alone to follow, and that is before you throw the fact that Sarah needs to learn the language quickly and to find a way to break into the freelance journalism market so that she can start to earn some income. Being a freelance journalist means that she must work from home which is a way that the author is isolated from others, and she must find ways to counteract this loneliness.

Turnbull takes us through some of the well known French clichés but also some of the less well known quirks as well. She writes about the French obsession with food, talking not only of the lunch that she ate in a Michelin star restaurant but also of her joy at eventually moving to an area of Paris where there is still a fresh food market. She tells of starting most days with a café crème at her local café, and attends dinner parties where it is expected that there will be numerous courses and if they aren’t right there will be criticisms made - very different to the barbecue in the backyard that most Australians would be used to.

One of the other things that Turnbull talk about included fashion, and the way that seeing seeing how the French dress influenced her to dress better. At one point, she and Frederic had a conversation about how no French person would wear their tracksuit pants to the bakery for fear of upsetting the baker. A few days later I thought about how I would manage in France as I just popped down to the shops in my trackydacks, old smelly trainers and jumper! Non, non, non!

Other subjects to be examined include making friends, the French concept of home (wherein Frederic returns to his small town in Normandy on a very regular basis), moving house to a fabulous sounding apartment in central Paris and the joy of living in the beautiful city but also the issues that brings, Frederic's first visit to Australia and more. All of the anecdotes are told with humour and with a candour that at times can verge on harsh (for example when she talks about how difficult it can be to make friends with French women), but I can also definitely imagine. One of the other fun stories was when Sarah and Frederic decide to buy a dog. Sarah is determined that there do Maddie is not going to be a pampered Parisian pooch, but it doesn't take long before Maddie goes everywhere with her and often provides entres into conversation that might not have otherwise existed.

One of the strengths of the book for me was that Turnbull not only observes as an outsider looking at French society but that she was trying to understand so that she could assimilate as much as it would be possible for an Australian moving to France could, especially someone whose partner is French and so she doesn't want to let him down at all. Also, she took the time to compare and contrast the two cultures and the way they approach everyday things like food or the service that they expect in shops or aesthetic beauty whether it be in their own home or in hotel rooms with terrible art on the walls for example.

One of the other things that was quite interesting to me was that Sarah and I were both travelling at around the same time and so there were some key events that were mentioned during the book that I remember quite clearly. For example, when France won the soccer World Cup in 1998, I remember watching the final and then seeing the news reports of the people of Paris celebrating whilst Sarah Turnbull writes about being there. Whereas she ended up living a fabulous life in Paris I ended up living for 5 years in the UK, and I obviously came back to Australia a lot sooner than she did.

While I was living in an English speaking country with a similar culture and so did not face a lot of the same difficulties as she did, I was involved with a Nigerian man whose friends were predominantly other young Nigerian men and so could really relate to the feeling of ostracism that comes with sitting around a table or lounge for a meal and not being able to follow the conversation because it was in another language that you either didn’t know or weren’t fluent in, to having no one make any effort to include you in the conversation, to that feeling of just filling a space rather than being an integral part of the gathering.

I listened to the audiobook version of this book which was narrated by Caroline Lee, who I am almost convinced is pretty much the only female Australian narrator out there. I know that isn’t true, but this is the fourth audiobook that I have listened to this year where she was the narrator, and she also narrates several that I have considered listening to. I did like her narration in this book. I think her voice is more suited to contemporary storytelling, or at least I didn’t like her as much when I was listening to historical novels, particularly ones where there was a wide variety of different accents.
This book was published in the early 2000's and it has taken all this time for a follow up book to be released. I am looking forward to finding out what happens next to Frederic and Sarah.


Rating 4/5

Synopsis

A delightful, fresh twist on the travel memoir, Almost French takes us on a tour that is fraught with culture clashes but rife with deadpan humor.

Sarah Turnbull's stint in Paris was only supposed to last a week. Chance had brought Sarah and Frédéric together in Bucharest, and on impulse she decides to take him up on his offer to visit him in the world's most romantic city. Sacrificing Vegemite for vichyssoise, the feisty journalist does her best to fit in, although her conversation, her laugh, and even her wardrobe advertise her foreign status.

But as she navigates the highs and lows of this strange new world, from life in a bustling quartier and surviving Parisian dinner parties to covering haute couture fashion shows and discovering the paradoxes of French culture, little by little Sarah falls under its spell: maddening, mysterious, and charged with that French specialty—seduction.

I read this book for following challenges/events:

Addition by Toni Jordan

Grace Lisa Vandenburg counts....everything. Her life is very precisely ordered. She gets out of her single bed at the exact same time of the morning everyday, she always goes to the same cafe, and she always orders the same cake (orange poppyseed) which she always cuts into precisely the same number of pieces. She always buys exactly the same number of chicken breasts, potatoes, bananas when she does her food shopping. She always counts her steps, she has been known to count the number of alfalfa sprouts that she puts on her lunch time sandwich. She always speaks to her mother at precisely the same time each Sunday night follow shortly after by a conversation with her sister.

She is also obsessed with the life story of inventor Nicola Testa, who is famous inventor, most well known for his contribution to the development of electricity.

What we know as a reader fairly early on is that this obsession has affected Grace's degree to such an extent that she doesn't function as a 'normal' person does. She no longer can drive a vehicle or work in her job as a teacher. She has very limited social interactions and those that she does have are in very rigid environs - like the woman in the coffee shop that Grace orders her cake and hot chocolate from every day.

One day, when Grace is at the supermarket, she has a bit of a problem:

My shopping trolley has 2 trays of chicken thighs, fat and glossy, each tray containing 5. A carton of eggs marked as a dozen. (Each week I assure ecstasy-boy or high-pain-threshold-girl, a Kiwi backpacker with seven piercings in each ear, that I have already checked the eggs. This is so they won’t open the carton and notice I have removed 2 and left them in the assorted spices.) Plastic bags containing 100 beans (that’s a pain), 10 carrots, 10 baby potatoes, 10 small onions. 100 grams of salad mix. (I refuse to shop in a supermarket without a digital scale.) 10 little tins of tuna. 10 orange bottles of shampoo. 9 bananas.

What?

Count again.

How the fuck did I get 9 bananas in my trolley?

After a brief panic, Grace comes up with a solution. There is a man behind her who has a solitary banana in his shopping. All she needs is to create a distraction and surreptitiously acquire his banana. She thinks that she has gotten away with it, until he confronts her outside and asks why she stole his banana. This is the first interaction with Seamus Joseph O'Reilly, but he is determined that it is not going to be the last.

After a slow start involving Seamus being stood up while Grace counted the bristles on her toothbrush, a relationship between the two of them develops. The attraction between the two of them is strong, and they make each other laugh, and it doesn't take Seamus long to realise that there is something different about Grace and that part of what makes her interesting is the difference! As for Grace, she soon realises that she forgets to count when Seamus is around.

Seamus is an ordinary man, with an ordinary job, and he knows that Grace is something special to him, but he also wants to see her happy and so the two of them begin to talk about treatments. Seamus was a fantastic leading man to read about. I would be quite happy to find a Seamus myself, but I am not sure I am about to start stealing vegetables from other people's shopping at the supermarket!

While there is a strong romantic element to the book, really it is a story that is all about Grace - about why she is the way she is stemming from a childhood incident, to how she lost her job, her relationships with her family and how her life is affected when she meets a man like Seamus. It is funny and tender, and was so enjoyable to listen to. I have seen this referred to as thinking woman's chick lit, which fits to a degree. It is about Grace's journey so it does have that in common with chick lit, but it also tackles in depth issues in a way that is funny and emotional. The reader shouldn't go into it expecting to read about fashion, shopping, brand names or anything like that.

One of the most interesting aspects of this story was the focus on an unusual example of a mental health issue. Grace knows that the counting rules her life - how can she not? - but she is also determined that she is not like "those crazy handwashers". As she and Seamus talk through her issues and as she starts the treatments, she is looking forward to being normal, whatever that means, but it soon becomes clear that rather than bringing more to her life, she loses herself in the process. It was heartbreaking to read this part of the novel and had me thinking a lot about why it is that the process that she was going on was about making Grace the same as everyone else, rather than modifying the behaviour to enable functionality but still allowing Grace the space to be her unique self.

Without giving too much away, I loved the way that the author was able to end this story in a way that did allow Grace the freedom to be herself.

As I mentioned before, I listened to this on audiobook, mainly because I went to an author event where Toni Jordan was present at a couple of months ago and won a doorprize which was this audiobook. It is the first audiobook that I listened to after completing listening to A Breath of Snow and Ashes by Diana Gabaldon which was 48 (!) CDs long and took me about three months to listen to. It was therefore something of a shock initially to find myself listening not to Scottish and American accents but rather listening to an Australian narrator (Caroline Lee) tell an Australian story, but one with themes that I suspect will be recognised universally. For the most part I liked the narration even though I found the voice kind of girlish, maybe too young. There were a couple of characters that I didn't think worked in terms of the inflections and tones, one of which was the group therapy facilitator (whose name I can't remember right now)

This was the first book that I finished reading/listening to this year, and it was a good place to start my reading year. I am looking forward to reading Toni Jordan's next book, Fall Girl, and really looking forward to reading her latest book which is set again in Melbourne but during World War II!

Rating 4/5

Synopsis

Grace Lisa Vandenburg counts. The letters in her name (19). The steps she takes every morning to the local café (920); the number of poppy seeds on her slice of orange cake, which dictates the number of bites she'll take to finish it. Grace counts everything, because numbers hold the world together. And she needs to keep an eye on how they're doing.

Seamus Joseph O'Reilly (also a 19, with the sexiest hands Grace has ever seen) thinks she might be better off without the counting. If she could hold down a job, say. Or open her kitchen cupboards without conducting an inventory, or make a sandwich containing an unknown number of sprouts. Grace's problem is that Seamus doesn't count.

This book counts for the following challenges