Product Description

Raised the daughter of a Jewish lawyer who prosecuted Nazi war criminals, Alice escapes into another world via the French language and culture yet finds, through deconstructionist history, the existence of French fascism, and ultimately her intellectual coming of age. Reprint. NYT. UP.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #169573 in Books
• Published on: 1994-10-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 232 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780226424194
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Amazon.com Review
An original and engaging memoir about a young girl seduced by the French language, its forms, and its culture. French Lessons is not just a growing-up story, but a story about language, the compulsion to embrace foreigness to discover oneself, and the growth of intellectual awareness.

From Publishers Weekly
Kaplan ( Reproductions of Banality ), a teacher of French literature at Duke University, describes the impact of her preoccupation with the French language on her life. Initially, her passion for French culture provided her with a route out of her midwestern Jewish background. While studying in France, she was drawn to the work of Celine, the brilliant French novelist who was also a virulent anti-Semite. At Yale she wrote her dissertation on French fascist intellectuals; she discusses here the impact of the later discovery that her revered professor, the deconstructionist Paul de Man, had written for the pro-Nazi Belgian press. Since Kaplan's father was a judge at the Nuremberg Nazi war crimes trials, her intellectual investigation adds a unique personal component to this eloquent memoir.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Kaplan (French, Duke Univ.) initially used French as an escape to an inner world of self-expression. She admired French intellectual achievement, but harsh reality intruded when she confronted the writings of French fascist intellectuals like Louis Ferdinand Celine. These discoveries formed Kaplan's "French lessons." Fascinated by the music in Celine's Journey to the End of the Night , she was nevertheless baffled by his anti-Semitism. Also, her famous scholar-teacher at Yale, Paul de Man, disappointed her, a fact made more poignant by the relevation in the mid-Eighties that de Man had written articles for the Nazis in Belgium during World War II. This memoir is spiked with anecdotes, personal observations, and insights about learning French and teaching French. It provides entertaining and enjoyable reading for everyone, particularly French scholars and professors. Highly recommended.
- Bob Ivey, Memphis State Univ., Tenn.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Haunting book.....
It is said when the student is ready the teacher will appear, and for me this has always been the case. Having first studied Latin and Spanish, I finally arrived at a point in my life where I wanted to learn French. Suddenly, everything seemed to facilitate my efforts. My job enabled me to travel to France, I discovered my new colleague was a French tutor in his spare time, and one day I found this little book.

Imagine a story about learning a language that holds your interest as the momentum builds until suddenly you reach the climax -- the sounding of the perfect French "R". Those who've worked and worked at learning a language can appreciate the moment. But this book is not just about reaching the perfect French "R" it's about coming of age.

The writer is a professor of French Literature at Duke University who says she found her own voice through the learning of another language--French. But before she did that, she was a young girl living in America who was the daughter of a man who took part in the Trials at Nuremberg. And, she had a Jewish grandmother who spoke to her in Yiddish.

Alice Kaplan's autobiography of her early years in America and France and her recollected memories of her parents and grandparents, especially her father and her grandmother are haunting.

A helpful book, and a bit of a puzzle, too.
This is a book about learning to speak French almost perfectly, and it uses this process - learning French - as a complicated metaphor for something else entirely. I wasn't quite sure what, exactly, but it evidently has to do with switching languages as a way to fiddle with or tune up or peer in upon repressed memories: Individual memories, national memories, the author's personal memories.

In other words, this is a book about How to Learn French in the same way that Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Mechanics was a book about How to Fix Your Motorcycle. You could learn from Zen, etc., how to change your spark plugs, yes, but it was a book about living with schizophrenia. Similarly, you can learn a lot of French grammar from French Lessons, but it is a book about living with death. It is nevertheless cheerful.

She writes brilliantly, with wonderful turns of phrase that make you smile again and again as you read. "... the push and pull of conversation," for example. Or, following a highly physical description of a new boyfriend, she appends: "He was a moralist and had theories."

The subjunctive is a tense that has been largely lost from English but survives in French to help express obligation, doubt, uncertainty, sentiment, desire, possibility, impossibility, etc. She observes that we live most of our lives in the subjunctive.

She makes sense, in English, of three past tenses of French verbs (the passe simple, the passe compose and the imparfait). Her explanation will stick with you --- practical and excellent help for a student of French. But it is also a demonstration of her special gift for, and evident obsession with, timelines, history, and the suddenness of terrible things.

Every now and then the book goes straight out of control. It includes long winded ego trips, academic winks and nudges, other stuff that was evidently written into the book to be read by specific readers who knew her personally. But you can spot and skip these passages easily enough.

When she stays on the bicycle she is just terrific. I look forward to reading her more recent book.

for those who inexplicably miss france
a friend of mine lent me this book while i was writing my senior thesis on contemporary french history. although i should have been researching and translating my sources, this book introduced me to a kindred spirit. through the author's memories, my own sentiments surrounding france, literature and language acquisition were echoed by her story. this is a must-read for anyone who isn't french, but is still homesick for france.