'Be fluent in French life and culture' is the promise the publishers make to readers in Speak the Culture: France. This is the first title in a planned new series of books (Spain is due soon) intended to complement conventional travel guidebooks and language guides, and take you to the heart of a nation. They're aimed at new residents, language students, people going to France on vacation or for business, or just anyone with an interest in French life and culture.
What is it like to be French, is the question they hope to answer for the benefit of everyone who isn't French. What is it like to have grown up in the country of Cézanne, Camus, General de Gaulle and Brigitte Bardot?
The question is covered in almost 300 pages of in-depth information on every aspect of French life: its history, literature and philosophy, food and drink, cinema and music, media and sport, drama and architecture. In short, everything that makes France what it is today.
Speak the Culture: France is a book for dipping into rather than reading. Divided into 8 chapters that cover all aspects of French life, the margins are filled with snappy snippets of information ('Paris is Europe's most densely populated capital city'), with lists ('the ten New Wave films you need to watch'), and with quotations ('No art was ever less spontaneous than mine': Dégas).
Rather than a book of dense essays, Speak the Culture is more of a kaleidoscope of information, a jigsaw that the reader slowly pieces together in their mind. Whether knowing that 'Orange in Provence is the warmest town in France' will help you understand the French any better is at first sight debatable. Yet it's one of the bits of information that you would pick up, growing up in a country, and file away at the back of your mind as a nugget of trivia.
Yet some trivia is not so trivial. As a sign of how up-to-date the book is, this is one of the bits of insider information it provides: 'As Jacques Chirac handed over the reigns of Presidential power to Nicolas Sarkozy in May 2007, among his final tasks was briefing the newcomer on the launch codes for the French nuclear arsenal.' Now, is that a scary thought?
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