Paris in July, II: Beauvais, Brown, Elkin and Lebovitz
July has been one long heat wave here in southern England. Luckily, it’s a bit cooler than it was earlier in the month, and we’re developing strategies for coping with what seems to be the new normal – until it gets worse again. My main tactic has been doing very little on most days apart from sitting on the couch or reclining on a mattress with a stack of books to hand. So it’s been good for one thing (maybe two): finishing books – and watching swifts. Following on from my first set of four Paris reads, I have another four (and five more coming up before the end of the month): a teen novel about overcoming peers’ prejudice, an essay anthology about the enduring appeal of the city for authors, a fragmentary memoir composed on a phone during a bus commute, and a record of a chef’s home renovation journey from hell.
Piglettes by Clémentine Beauvais (2014; 2017)
This was my second YA novel by Beauvais (after In Paris with You); she translated both herself and her proficiency in both languages allowed her to include wordplay that might have been lost otherwise (“I finally get what it means to have l’esprit de l’escalier, when I scream to her, from the bottom of the staircase…”). Mireille LaPlanche’s former friend Malo introduced a cruel annual tradition at their high school: a “Pig Pageant” in which classmates pick the fattest, ugliest girls – including her. She decides to team up with two other finalists, Astrid and Hakima, and show their persecutors what they can do. After a period of planning and training, they undertake a week-long cycle ride from their home in Bourg-en-Bresse to Paris, timed so that they’ll arrive on Bastille Day and crash the president’s garden party. Hakima’s older brother, Kader, who lost his legs in the Iraq War and uses a wheelchair, is their chaperone. They’ve dubbed themselves the “Three Little Piglettes” and tow a trailer full of sausages that they cook and sell at each stop. Soon they’re a social media phenomenon. This sweet, funny Cinderella story about defusing fatphobia includes good diversity rep and touches on lots of issues including anxiety, bullying, and unrequited love – all with an unmistakably French enthusiasm for wine, cheese and philosophy. (Edelweiss) 
A Paris All Your Own: Bestselling Women Writers on the City of Light, ed. Eleanor Brown (2017)
A reread that I started shortly after our trip to Paris in December 2023 but left half-finished on a shelf until this month. The roster of 18 contributors leans very much towards women’s fiction. While I probably most enjoyed the third of the book that was by authors I’d read and liked before – J. Courtney Sullivan, Susan Vreeland, Paula McLain, Julie Powell, Therese Anne Fowler and Maggie Shipstead – all of the pieces are cosy and undemanding. They tell of time spent living, working or travelling in the city. Sometimes it meets expectations; other times, mishaps and faux pas create disillusionment until a future visit grants a second chance. There are favourite foods and language struggles, art treasures and magical spots to discover, and stereotypes to confirm or overturn. The experience of Paris can vary based on who the travel companion is – an enthusiastic child, a needy parent or a soon-to-be ex. Fowler made her research trip before writing a biographical novel about Zelda Fitzgerald, while McLain only saw Hemingway’s haunts after she’d written The Paris Wife. Each essay finishes with a quickfire list of favourite Paris moments, books, sites, songs, etc. Not a bad substitute for being there! (Secondhand – 2nd & Charles)
My original rating (2017): 
My rating now:
No. 91/92: Notes on a Parisian Commute by Lauren Elkin (2021)
Just imagine keeping a diary of your bus journeys in the Notes app of your phone for seven months and getting a book out of it. Elkin’s mostly unedited observations are based on people-watching and her own swirling thoughts in 2014–15. She covers obnoxious behaviours on public transport (the same the world over, it seems: “Oi. Manspreader. Bouge ton cul”); her teaching work; overheard conversations; and Paris as seen in different seasons. Her mind wanders across history and theory. The bus is a melting pot: She’s thrown into false intimacy with people she’s never seen before and hopes never to encounter again. Nothing much happens until it does. First it’s the Charlie Hebdo attacks. Then she falls pregnant but it’s ectopic and she loses the baby. And, after she’s switched to Métro commuting, the Hypercacher attacks. In the prologue and epilogue, Elkin talks about only understanding major events in retrospect. She also cites lockdown diaries as being a new subgenre her project fit into. But let’s be honest: if she’d not already made a name for herself as a cultural critic, this would never have been published. While it has some value as an in-the-moment historical document, I didn’t find it nearly as profound as, say Deborah Levy’s autobiography. (Secondhand – Awesomebooks.com with SellItBack voucher) 
L’appart: The Delights and Disasters of Making My Paris Home by David Lebovitz (2017)
Lebovitz is a San Francisco pastry chef who moved to Paris a couple of decades ago. We get a lot of ideas from his dessert cookbook and extensive blog archive. Like The Sweet Life in Paris, this contains lighthearted musings about cultural differences between France and the US and many tantalizing recipes (most of them sweet but also a few savoury) that I am actually likely to make. But it’s primarily about the several-year saga of buying and restoring an apartment. Lebovitz had a grand plan for the kitchen, especially: a huge space with American-style appliances that would ease his cookbook writing and testing. French bureaucracy made the purchase difficult enough as the property had to be officially reregistered as residential rather than commercial, and the seller and realtor were both antagonistic.
But that was nothing compared to the nightmare of the renovation. To start with, Lebovitz was friendly with his contractor and his workers. In fact, too friendly, his partner, Romain, warned. He called the builders “tu,” brought fresh-baked treats for them, and always paid their bills promptly. They started taking liberties: hardly ever showing up, failing to meet deadlines, replying to every concern with “pas de problème” but never fixing the issues. The shoddiness and incompetence are truly astounding: counters at the wrong height, an unusable faucet, melted fuses, an electricity leak, buckled floorboards, askew windows, an upside-down water softener. Every mistake cost time and money, such that the whole job was three times longer and more expensive than projected. (A lawyer dissuaded Lebovitz from suing because in the French legal system it could take five years and not even go his way.)
Depending on your own experience, this might be cathartic, or too close to home, or a cautionary tale. (We’d already long decided we won’t do any major building projects because we can’t tolerate noise, disruption or strangers and our house is good enough for our needs.) Keep in mind that Lebovitz dealt with all this in a second language and his fortitude is impressive. Scenes at Ikea and conversations with his contractor are amusingly surreal. But I confess I did find this a little overlong and repetitive, and every setback made me cringe for him. I’ll have to bake some frangipane plum-raspberry gratins and try to forget the pain. (Secondhand – Better World Books with Little Free Library voucher)
Three Days in June vs. Three Weeks in July
Two very good 2025 releases that I read from the library. While they could hardly be more different in tone and particulars, I couldn’t resist linking them via their titles.
Three Days in June by Anne Tyler
(From my Most Anticipated list.) A delightful little book that I loved more than I expected to, for several reasons: the effective use of a wedding weekend as a way of examining what goes wrong in marriages and what we choose to live with versus what we can’t forgive; Gail’s first-person narration, a rarity for Tyler* and a decision that adds depth to what might otherwise have been a two-dimensional depiction of a woman whose people skills leave something to be desired; and the unexpected presence of a cat who brings warmth and caprice back into her home. (I read this soon after losing my old cat, and it was comforting to be reminded that cats and their funny ways are the same the world over.)
From Tyler’s oeuvre, this reminded me most of The Amateur Marriage and has a surprise Larry’s Party-esque ending. The discussion of the outmoded practice of tapping one’s watch is a neat tie-in to her recurring theme of the nature of time. And through the lunch out at a chic crab restaurant, she succeeds at making the Baltimore setting essential rather than incidental, more so than in much of her other work.
Gail is in the sandwich generation with a daughter just married and an old mother who’s just about independent. I appreciated that she’s 61 and contemplating retirement, but still feels as if she hasn’t a clue: “What was I supposed to do with the rest of my life? I’m too young for this, I thought. Not too old, as you might expect, but too young, too inept, too uninformed. How come there weren’t any grownups around? Why did everyone just assume I knew what I was doing?”
My only misgiving is that Tyler doesn’t quite get it right about the younger generation: women who are in their early thirties in 2023 (so born about 1990) wouldn’t be called Debbie and Bitsy. To some degree, Tyler’s still stuck back in the 1970s, but her observations about married couples and family dynamics are as shrewd as ever. Especially because of the novella length, I can recommend this to readers wanting to try Tyler for the first time.
*I’ve noted it in Earthly Possessions. Anywhere else?
Three Weeks in July: 7/7, The Aftermath, and the Deadly Manhunt by Adam Wishart and James Nally
July 7th is my wedding anniversary but before that, and ever since, it’s been known as the date of the UK’s worst terrorist attack, a sort of lesser 9/11 – and while reading this I felt the same way that I’ve felt reading books about 9/11: a sort of awed horror. Suicide bombers who were born in the UK but radicalized on trips to Islamic training camps in Pakistan set off explosions on three Underground trains and one London bus. I didn’t think my memories of 7/7 were strong, yet some names were incredibly familiar to me (chiefly Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the attacks; Jean Charles de Menezes, the innocent Brazilian electrician shot dead on a Tube train when confused with a suspect in the 21/7 copycat plot – police were operating under a new shoot-to-kill policy and this was the tragic result).
Fifty-two people were killed that day, ranging in age from 20 to 60; 20 were not UK citizens, hailing from everywhere from Grenada to Mauritius. But a total of 770 people were injured. I found the authors’ recreation of events very gripping, though do be warned that there is a lot of gruesome medical and forensic detail about fatalities and injuries. They humanize the scale of events and make things personal by focusing on four individuals who were injured, even losing multiple limbs in some cases, but survived and now work in motivational speaking, disability services or survivor advocacy.
What really got to me was thinking about all the hundreds of people who, 20 years on, still live with permanent pain, disability or grief because of the randomness of them or their loved ones getting caught up in a few misguided zealots’ plot. One detail that particularly struck me: with the Tube tunnels closed off at both ends while searchers recovered bodies, the temperature rose to 50 degrees C (122 degrees F), only exacerbating the stench. The book mostly avoids cliches and overwriting, though I did find myself skimming in places. It is based on the research done for a BBC documentary series and synthesizes a lot of material in an engaging way that does justice to the victims.
Have you read one or both of these?
Could you see yourself picking one of them up?
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 