A book: "A year in the merde"

You start a new book at around midnight on a Saturday evening, and you don't notice the hours pass by till you only have a few pages left and it's 6AM and you've barely stopped a few times to change the music and to get some more nibbles or sthg to drink. All the while you are concerned that you are often laughing so loud that you are going to wake up your neighbours. That was at least my experience of "A year in the merde", by Stephen Clarke.



The story is about this young and ambitious British manager who accepts a job in Paris to launch a chain of tea-rooms, but not only that. The book is a description of all aspects of the culture shock of a Briton (any foreigner, really) arriving in France: language problems, work etiquette and attitudes, body language even, food, restaurants, the housing market in Paris, the continuous strikes, political ethics, the French health service...

A terrific book, and indispensable reading if you have lived or are going to live in Paris for a while, and although you might think sometimes it is borderline psychedelia (if you have not experienced living in Paris yet, that is), it's all true (probably). And best of all, it's a book with very little concessions to political correctness.

Just one last warning: if you are French, you might not like it.