3.5
French Lessons
ByPublisher Description
Brilliantly uniting the personal and the critical,
is a powerful autobiographical experiment. It tells the story of an American woman escaping into the French language and of a scholar and teacher coming to grips with her history of learning.
In spare, midwestern prose, by turns intimate and wry, Kaplan describes how, as a student in a Swiss boarding school and later in a junior year abroad in Bordeaux, she passionately sought the French "r," attentively honed her accent, and learned the idioms of her French lover. When, as a graduate student, her passion for French culture turned to the elegance and sophistication of its intellectual life, she found herself drawn to the language and style of the novelist Louis-Ferdinand Celine. At the same time, she was repulsed by his anti-Semitism. At Yale in the late 70s, during the heyday of deconstruction she chose to transgress its apolitical purity and work on a subject "that made history impossible to ignore": French fascist intellectuals. Kaplan's discussion of the "de Man affair" —the discovery that her brilliant and charismatic Yale professor had written compromising articles for the pro-Nazi Belgian press—and her personal account of the paradoxes of deconstruction are among the most compelling available on this subject.
belongs in the company of Sartre's
and the memoirs of Nathalie Sarraute, Annie Ernaux, and Eva Hoffman. No book so engrossingly conveys both the excitement of learning and the moral dilemmas of the intellectual life.
Download the free Fable app
Stay organized
Keep track of what you’re reading, what you’ve finished, and what’s next.
Build a better TBR
Swipe, skip, and save with our smart list-building tool
Rate and review
Share your take with other readers with half stars, emojis, and tags
Curate your feed
Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesStay organized
Keep track of what you’re reading, what you’ve finished, and what’s next.Build a better TBR
Swipe, skip, and save with our smart list-building toolRate and review
Share your take with other readers with half stars, emojis, and tagsCurate your feed
Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesFrench Lessons Reviews
3.5
“wonderful and charming and very special, although maybe in a niche personal way. I related deeply to Kaplan, I was also sent to a French school as a teenager, and have a complex relationship with the language. Although I never got my perfect native "R" so in other senses, we diverge.”
“This book sent me into a reading slump. Okayyy okayyyy i also started co-op and didn’t have time. BUTTTTTT yeah I didn’t like this very much, it was very all over the place and she annoys me.”
About Alice Kaplan
is the author of
,
,
, and
, and the translator of
, and
. Her books have been twice finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Awards, once for the National Book Award, and she is a winner of the
Book Prize. She holds the John M. Musser chair in French literature at Yale and lives in Guilford, Connecticut.
Other books by Alice Kaplan
Start a Book Club
Start a public or private book club with this book on the Fable app today!FAQ
Do I have to buy the ebook to participate in a book club?
Why can’t I buy the ebook on the app?
How is Fable’s reader different from Kindle?
Do you sell physical books too?
Are book clubs free to join on Fable?
How do I start a book club with this book on Fable?
