A Little Tour in France

A superbly artistic edition, but a very bitchy James book.

Meh – Abandoned. Invented this new TAG for my cataloguing, and as it is rare for me not to finish a book, I doubt it will get much future use. But regretfully, with this work the game, as they say, was not worth the candle. I am tempted to leave my review at just that quite explicit Meh that I have ‘borrowed’ from the one of the LT Group threads – actually it was used by our fearless leader here on LibraryThing, Tim himself. It is to be preferred to his so-called "French".

But no, this is the great Master himself, James, of The Turn of the Screw author, with over 34,700 LT members owning his works, who is an author worthy of at least an honest attempt at reading.

One reviewer, Author Mary Ann Hoberman of the New York Times writes show more that she and her husband ‘recently’ – actually 1983 or so – toured France using this work as a guide book. I suppose if you are not already a Francophile, and intend to spend half of your touring vacation in Tours and its immediate region (as half the book does) and LOVE cathedrals and castles; it could be a valid guide.

James writes that “Paris is not France” in his introduction, explaining that he feels many Americans think that it is. After his ‘Little tour of France” he concludes:” Neither is France Paris”. Okaay … neither is a continuously repetitious listing of campaniles, naves, transcripts are other architectural components a view of France. It is not that the author’s style is particularly dated; I enjoy RL Stevenson, Sam Clemens and about thirty other authors from the same period. Nor that the tour is conducted at a crawl dictated by the transport of the 1880s – in fact RLS Travels with a Donkey, or say Twain’s tours are even more perambulatory. It is just I had higher hopes, always thirsting for good travel narratives now that my favorites – Raban, Theroux, Morris et al– seem to have quasi-retired from the genre.

So - just disappointment from a reader’s unreasonable expectations then? But this is Henry James, the great master…

Oh - and surely it should be Jeanne d'Arc - not Jeanne Darc as though it was a common surname! show less

A very bitchy view of France with a nice introduction by his great biographer, Leon Edel.