Brilliantly uniting the personal and the critical, this powerful autobiographical experiment tells the story of an American woman escaping into the French language while grappling with her learning history. The narrative begins with a distinctly American quest for an idealized France of intellect, but soon confronts the darker aspects of French political and cultural life. The author, daughter of a Jewish lawyer who prosecuted Nazi war criminals, grew up in the Midwest during the 1960s. After her father's death at seven, French became her means of "leaving home" and discovering herself in another culture. In spare, midwestern prose, she recounts her passionate pursuit of the French "r," her accent refinement, and her immersion in the language and idioms of her French lover while studying in a Swiss boarding school and Bordeaux. As a graduate student, her fascination with French culture evolved into an interest in its intellectual elegance, particularly the work of Louis-Ferdinand Celine, despite his anti-Semitism. At Yale in the late 70s, she chose to explore the politically charged subject of French fascist intellectuals, engaging with the "de Man affair" and the complexities of deconstruction. This memoir resonates alongside the works of Sartre and other notable authors, capturing the excitement of learning and the moral dilemmas of intellectual life.
