A Year in the Merde author Stephen Clarke has been touted as the anti-Mayle, a reference to Peter Mayle, author of A Year in Provence, Toujours Provence, and several other novels that gently poke fun at an outsider’s cultural clash with everyday life in France. While Mayle focuses more on the complexities of life in rural France, Clarke’s novel targets the cultural differences between British and French city-folk and business practices.
But this is not meant to be a comparison between Mayle and Clarke, simply a review of A Year in the Merde. For those of you who slept through high school French class, merde is French for “shit,” and the novel’s main character, Paul West, certainly finds himself deep in it frequently – both literally (the streets of Paris are strewn with dog-droppings) and figuratively (in his business dealings and love life).
Paul West is a native of England, hired by a French corporation to manage the establishment of a chain of English tearooms in Paris. Despite butting heads with his entire team, as well as his boss, Paul manages to learn how to survive in the French business world. He learns from his mistakes and adapts.
Some of my favorite parts of this story were the passages that illuminate the excruciating entropy of French corporate minds that Paul must overcome to actually get any work done. I found the depictions of the French real estate market to be quite enlightening as well; especially the advice given to Paul that if he wants to find a decent apartment in Paris, he should find a girlfriend and move in with her.
Unfortunately, despite the very interesting details of the differences between British and French cultures, the character of Paul West is extremely immature, most notably when it comes to his attitude toward women and sex. Paul is shallow and lacking any qualities (other than not being French) to make me root for him to succeed. In the end, I didn’t really care what happened to him. Zut alors!
While Clarke claims that his story is based on his own experience as a Brit working in France, I think I would have preferred either straight-up memoir or straight-up fiction. As it is, Clarke has an annoying tendency of hyperbolizing what he thinks are witty misunderstandings. Fro example, the following exchange with his French realtor:
“Separate living?” the agent asked.
“Yes, I’m living alone at the moment.” Though I didn’t see what business it was of his. I could tell from the way the agent closed one eye and jabbed his pen in his ear that we were in noncommunication mode again.
“Er, separate salon?” the guy asked.
Now he thinks I’m one of a couple of gay hairdressers, I thought. This wasn’t going well at all.
“You want one bedroom and one separate uzzer room,” the agent tried again. “Salon is living, you know? Living room?”
“Ah! Yes. Right. A bedroom and a living room.” I nodded encouragingly.
“Okay. I av.”
Clarke’s editors should have reigned in his overwrought attempts at being clever, as most of them are complete failures.
If you really did not like the rural pokiness of Mayle’s Provence writings, you just might enjoy Clarke’s view from the other end of the spectrum. For me, though, A Year in the Merde promised more than it delivered, and maybe that was just another facet of French business that Clarke learned to work to his own advantage.
276 pgs.
