When in French: Love in a Second Language
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A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR‘Talking to you in English’, he said, ‘is like touching you with gloves.’A language barrier is no match for love. New Yorker journalist Lauren Collins discovers this first-hand when, in her early thirties, she moves to London and falls for Olivier, a Frenchman. As their relationship begins to grow, Lauren senses that there are things she doesn’t understand about Olivier, having never spoken to him in his mother tongue. (Does ‘I love you’ even mean the same thing as ‘je t’aime’?) And when they move to French-speaking Geneva, Lauren suddenly finds herself no longer able to talk to the local handymen or shop owners, let alone her husband’s parents.Fearful of one day finding herself unable to communicate with her own children, Lauren decides to learn French. Along the way, she faces a series of challenges, from awkward role-playing games at her Swiss language school, to accidentally telling her mother-in-law that she’s given birth to a coffee machine. But there are also unexpected pleasures: the delights of learning French words that have no English equivalent and the joys of winning her first argument against Olivier in his native tongue.A funny, thoughtful memoir, When in French considers how language shapes our lives, from how we think, to how we fall in love, and what happens when two languages, and two very different cultures, collide.
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Lauren Collins. When in French: Love in a Second Language
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
One. THE PAST PERFECT. Le Plus-que-parfait
Two. THE IMPERFECT. L’Imparfait
Three. THE PAST. Le Passé composé
Four. THE PRESENT. Le Présent
Five. THE CONDITIONAL. Le Conditionnel
Six. THE SUBJUNCTIVE. Le Subjonctif
Seven. THE FUTURE. Le Futur
Acknowledgments
About the Publisher
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For Olivier
But how can you
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For better or for worse, there was something off about us, in the way that we homed in on each other’s sentences, focusing too intently, as though we were listening to the radio with the volume down a notch too low. “You don’t seem like a married couple,” someone said, minutes after meeting us at a party. We fascinated each other and frustrated each other. We could go exhilaratingly fast, or excruciatingly slow, but we often had trouble finding a reliable intermediate setting, a conversational cruise control. We didn’t possess that easy shorthand, encoding all manner of attitudes and assumptions, by which some people seem able, nearly telepathically, to make themselves mutually known.
IN GENEVA, my lack of French introduced an asymmetry. I needed Olivier to execute a task as basic as buying a train ticket. He was my translator, my navigator, my amanuensis, my taxi dispatcher, my schoolmaster, my patron, my critic. Like someone very young or very old, I was forced to depend on him almost completely. A few weeks after the chimney sweep’s visit, the cable guy came: I dialed Olivier’s number and surrendered the phone, quiescent as a traveler handing over his papers. I had always been the kind of person who bounded up to the maître d’ at a restaurant, ready to wrangle for a table. Now, I hung back. I overpaid and underasked—a tax on inarticulacy. I kept telling waiters that I was dead—je suis finie—when I meant to say that I had finished my salad.
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