French Lessons: A Memoir

"This original, artful, engaging book belongs to an evolving genre of postmodern intellectual autobiography. Telling her story about a girl from the midwest who learned to speak perfect French, a student of deconstruction who became intrigued by fascism, Alice Kaplan writes insightfully also about language, memory, politics, and writing. Kaplan's father was a lawyer at the Nuremberg trials who died when she was only seven: she recalls the frightening photographs of concentration camp victims she found among his papers. The glamour of otherness and the allure of evil-as well as the characters of various mentors, meals, lovers, and students- are the subjects of this witty and insightful memoir."--Rachel M. Brownstein, author of Becoming a Heroine "Alice Kaplan beautifully describes the intricate mixture of lust and embarrassment and voyeurism and submission and pride involved in immersing oneself in another language. . . . This girl's own story---of a daughter, a spy in the house of French, a teacher and scholar-is imbued with a sense of the multiplicity of identity, and it gracefully tells us what Kaplan says French has taught her: 'There is more than one way to speak.' "--Lisa Cohen "Voice Literary Supplement " "An uncommonly forthright and concise piece of autobiography. Kaplan has shown that university professors, too, can have a past worth telling, that the subjects they teach may mean far more to them than any student could begin to guess."--John Sturrock "London Review of Books " "French Lessons captures the excitement Kaplan experienced as she fell into the French language: mastering the difficulties of French pronunciation, the forms of the French verb, the forms of French politeness."--Thomas McGonigle "Chicago Tribune " "Born a Jewish daughter of the American Midwest, Alice Kaplan became a professor of French and an expert on the literature of French fascism. French Lessons is the story of her cultural odyssey, a brave attempt to articulate the compulsions that drove her to embrace foreignness in order to become truly herself. . . . Told in a 'staccato Midwestern style, ' her story of becoming French is arrestingly all-American."--Arthur Goldhammer "Washington Post Book World " "A lovely book. . . . From the childhood learning of words from her siblings, to her professorship at Duke, she has catalogued her desire to speak a foreign language and thereby to become something foreign and alluring herself."--Fred Turner "Boston Phoenix " "This is the most engaging new bildungsroman I have read in years-and especially because the bildung in question, the learning of French by a young American woman, brings with it such an amazing range of personal drama of modern and contemporary political and cultural history."--R. W. B. Lewis "Alice Kaplan has written a wonderful book, as accessible as light fiction and as polished and layered as poetry. . . . The precision and intensity of Kaplan's presentation of self in everyday life makes for an extraordinary literary achievement."--Graham Fraser "Toronto Globe and Mail "