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 I'll Never Be French (No Matter What I Do)
by Mark Greenside"Mark Greenside, the only one of this year's pack to rely on conventional transport - a plane, a train and a taxi - to get where he's going, has an epiphany during a vacation in Brittany: he loves the place, despite his inability to speak French and his ignorance of local customs. Soon thereafter, he makes an impulsive purchase of an old riverfront house in the hamlet of Plobien. " Two days later", he reports, "I leave France with a French checkbook I don't know how to sue, a written agreement I can't read to buy a house, committed to spending $85,000 that I don't have. It doesn't bode well for international relations". What follows is a charming variation on the theme popularized two decades ago by the British writer Peter Mayle in his Provence series: Anglophone city slicker resettles in French hamlet and confronts domestic mini-disasters and eccentric locals. In Greenside's case, the problems include a wire transfer for the house purchase that's accidently re-routed to Corsica, a flood that destroys his newly refinished floor and a dispute with an irascible neighbor over Greenside's sun-blocking cypress trees. Although Greenside's struggles with French grow a bit tiresome, this slight memoir captures his blossoming Francophilia with an infectious joie de vivre."
--Joshua Hammer, New York Times Book Review  Paperback 244 pages - (6/09)
ZB6873 I'll Never Be French (No Matter What I Do) $14.99
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