French Impressions:
The Adventures of an American Family
-
- 3,99 €
-
- 3,99 €
Publisher Description
In 1950, as many families were establishing lives in suburbia, Mary and Frank Littell decided to uproot their young family from the comfort of their home in the United States and move to France for a year. Now, decades later, their son John S. Littell, who was four years old at the time of their French exploration, brings his mother’s journals to life and tells the story of living in the working-class town of Montpellier from her perspective.
French Impressions: The Adventures of an American Family chronicles one family’s adventures abroad, as Mary struggles to maintain a home in a new culture and to cook the local cuisine, while Frank traverses to various bars and nightly reads Great Expectations to his toddlers. These often comedic and heartening familial struggles will at once seem familiar and lost to the times gone by.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"No normal people, unless facing imminent arrest, would even contemplate such madness," Littell says of the year his family spent in France in the early 1950s. Frank Littell, John's father, enrolled at the University of Montpellier on the G.I. Bill, taking his wife, Mary, and his young sons along. The tales of the family's experiences in the south of France are told from the perspective of Mary, whose diaries and other writings form the basis for this memoir. With Frank busy at school, Mary is left to fend for herself and to try to make herself at home in the strange city. A self-described dunce at learning languages, she struggles to communicate with the locals, while her children, four-year-old John and 15-month-old Stephen, effortlessly switch between English and French. Mary recounts with self-deprecating humor the disastrous Thanksgiving dinner when, unable to procure a turkey, she unknowingly cooks a swan; her encounters with the "O-la-la ladies" (so-called for their invariable reaction to Mary's decadent American buying habits) during her daily shopping trips; and her horror when she discovers she has been ordering alcoholic cider for Stephen at their local watering hole. Inevitably, despite such obstacles, intrepid Mary and her family win the hearts of their neighbors and settle into the pace of life in Montpellier. Charmingly related with Mary's dry wit, the anecdotes that make up this memoir are amusing if dated. B&w photos.
