A Visit with the Bookseller

25 Feb, 2025

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I was chatting with a bookseller the other day, and she complimented me on my French,¹ lamenting how most people who come into her store simply start speaking to her in English (her shop is in a touristy part of town).

So much is lost when we confine ourselves to one language, she said. Whole other ways of thinking, of experiencing! I nodded solemnly. I was, in fact, in the bookstore hoping to find some motivation and material for expanding my own sense of written French. After a couple of years in Paris, I get by well enough conversationally, and I have no trouble following spoken French or regular prose, but literary writing remains tough.

Given her enthusiasm for the gifts of multilingualism, and my own fascination with the same, I asked her which other languages she read or spoke. None, really, she clarified; just enough English to manage the shop. Ah. Did you see it coming, dear reader? The problem wasn't so much monolingualism as the fact that it is English that has become the lingua franca (ouch).

2

I quite liked the bouqiniste, and don't mean to give her a hard time here, post facto. We are all inconsistent enough in sometimes wanting it one way but also the other way. I, for example, work a job with an extremely French organization in a bureaucracy of headspinningly unnecessary complexity. As a not-like-the-other-Americans-American, I wasn't going to settle for a plum, lucrative anglophone job hanging out with other expats. No sir. I was going native, up the river, full-tilt fat-Marlon-Brando-in-the-jungle surrounded by marinière-wearing, taxonomy-loving, cheese-for-dessert imbibing Gauls.² So naturally, having established a firm foothold in their world, I now dream of working in my beautiful native compound-adjective-embracing English, earning a good salary, and having no use for, much less an intimate understanding of, the word réunionite.³

A Yankee moving to France and working in the bowels of the country's administrative leviathan... you could imagine a nice European washing up on the shores of the East Coast to try her luck in one of those great American specialties such as healthcare or high speed rail. Might it be possible, in learning about, adapting to a guest country, to overdo it a bit?

3

Making a home in a foreign place occasionally feels like one of those charged dance-offs in old music videos. There's this beautiful stranger wriggling around in front of you, at once adversary and potential lover. Now she's sharing her cigarettes, asking you what New York is like, casually wondering if you've dated any Frenchies; now he's stabbing his finger in your chest and turning his nose up at you as he calls you back to the préfecture yet again to verify a problem with your titre de séjour. You're not totally sure what's going on much of the time, but it's a vibe.

And so you ask yourself: what are we doing in this dark alley? Who's that old guy sitting, watching? How did I get here?

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As the psychoanalyst Adam Philips writes in his excellent essay"Against Self-Criticism", "Ambivalence does not, in the Freudian story, mean mixed feelings, it means opposing feelings... We are ambivalent [...] about anything and everything that matters to us; indeed, ambivalence is the way we recognise that someone or something has become significant to us." This ought to be informative to trolls, who everywhere, upon hearing our immigrant whining, offer up: if you don't like it, why don't you go back to where you came from? Because in loving this place, we are saying: this is who we are. And in hating it, we are saying: this is who we are. Obviously, this ambivalence isn't reserved for immigrants; only rabid nationalism seems to cure one of it.

I'm reminded as well of that heartachingly-good film The Last Black Man in San Francisco, whose homegrown protagonist Jimmy chastises a couple of transplants he overhears whining about the city on the bus: "you don't get to hate it unless you love it."

I was a green San Franciscan myself when the film came out, and I remember being so attuned to the intricate system by which one's race, clothing, language, and of course, job, all conspired to render you either a deserving participant or an unwelcome parasite in that little pressure cooker of a city. The exchange seemed to be saying, thou shalt not criticize the city which thou gentrifies, you yuppie scum. The women on the bus are duly taken to task by our hero for having complained while lacking the requisite level of Minimum Local Cred. But now I'm more curious how Jimmy's line might serve not as prescription, but an observation about the quality of the frustration they suppose themselves to be experiencing. As Phillips suggests, "wherever we hate we love, wherever we love we hate." They can find SF mildly annoying, but they can't really hate it out of proportion with whatever limited skin in the game they have.

And nobody knows this better than the French, who, for all their amour propre, have the frankly redeeming quality of being forever their own loudest critics, harshest satirists, and more ardent would-be reformers.⁴ To be a foreigner working in French administration is to witness and participate, in a rather hapless way, in an insular ancient rite whose own high priests know it is unjustifiably unwieldy and more than a little bit absurd. It's an intimacy, and like all intimacies, perhaps, it's both gratifying to be included and a bit disgusting to behold.

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So, my bookseller friend, I hear you. Carry forth the torch of polyglottery and the riches of cultural exchange! And if it all starts to feel like un peu too much, at least you'll soon have more useless Americans coming through to rail against.

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