Lauren Collins’s Memoir on Falling in Love in French

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/18/books/review/when-in-french-lauren-collins.html

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WHEN IN FRENCHLove in a Second LanguageBy Lauren Collins243 pp. Penguin Press. $27.

The first time I went to Geneva, something exciting, even weird, happened. This came as a surprise, because Geneva had seemed like a place where nothing exciting or weird ever happened. A friend and I had spent the day dutifully waiting during “Don’t Walk” signals, chatting no louder than in a whisper, admiring with some discomfort the total absence of dirt or disorder, when suddenly we happened upon a large crowd of people standing in a circle. On the ground before them was a roadwork sign, fallen on its side, smothered in honey and swarming with hundreds of bumblebees. In Geneva, a city of mainly bankers, bureaucrats and relentless prosperity, this minor oddity seemed like either a radical act of civil disobedience or the harbinger of the coming apocalypse.

In “When in French,” the American writer Lauren Collins sets herself up for a challenging task in trying to write a book about the difficulties of moving to Geneva, integrating with its culture and, most important, speaking one of its four lan­guages, French. “I felt as though the instruction manual to living in Switzerland had been written in invisible ink,” she writes early on. I wasn’t sure how much sympathy I could muster for her. These days, when even much of Europe feels fragile and volatile, there are far worse fates than landing in one of the most placid cities on earth.

But Collins’s book turns out to be far more ambitious than the average memoir about moving abroad. Its first pages are not a good gauge of what is to come: a thoughtful, beautifully written meditation on the art of language and intimacy. The book unfolds like several books in one: on moving abroad, on communication in human relationships, on the history of language and, in the end, on the delights of cross-cultural fusion.

The impetus for the book, and Collins’s move from London to Switzerland, is her relationship with a Frenchman from just outside Bordeaux named Olivier. He speaks English and obsessively looks up the meanings of words like “capillarity,” determined to use them correctly. Collins speaks no French. Living together brings a daunting set of roadblocks; even with English as a common tongue, Collins sensed she would never truly know her future spouse that way. “We could go exhilaratingly fast, or excruciatingly slow, but we often had trouble finding a reliable intermediate setting, a conversational cruise control,” Collins writes. “We didn’t possess that easy shorthand, encoding all manner of attitudes and assumptions, by which some people seem able, nearly telepathically, to make themselves mutually known.” More cuttingly, Olivier remarks, “Talking to you in English is like touching you with gloves.”

This statement understandably sends Collins searching for her linguistic soul. She takes us back to her childhood in Wilmington, N.C., where, in a moving passage, she relates how her father had an accident and fell into a coma at age 37, struggling afterward to regain the power of speech. One day he looks at his daughter and calls her Bluebird. In many ways this aching memory seems the emotional motivation for understanding the way humans relate to words, as if the idea for the book had been planted in Collins as a child, but bloomed when she was an adult.

Her quest involves many digressions and mini-essays. She takes on Americans’ aversion to foreign languages, most memorably in the tale of Nick George, a college student who was detained at the Philadelphia airport for carrying Arabic flash cards because, according to the security agent, it was the language of the man “who did 9/11.” In another, she details the diplomatic faux pas and foreign policy disasters that may have arisen from linguistic misunderstandings, such as when a comment by the Japanese premier in 1945 might have helped induce the Americans to drop the atomic bomb. Collins also questions the effects of a world that speaks mostly English: “It is as unhealthy for the global community to rely too heavily on one language as it is to mass-­cultivate a single crop.”

And then there is the (very likable) love story. Collins discovers that the word itself — “love” — is used differently in America and in France. The French reserve it for a few. The Americans say it as if they caught a verbal tic. “I love my parents, my friends, my colleagues, the woman who gives me extra guacamole at Chipotle, hydrangeas, podcasts, clean sheets,” Collins writes. “Olivier has only ever loved me.”

That’s just one example of Collins’s storytelling talent; the woman sure knows how to close a paragraph. I often found myself shaking my head in admiration at her sentences, the way her ideas would cohere. She has also nailed the best metaphor for that utterly desperate moment when, in a foreign language, you can’t find the correct word but really, really need to swear like a truck driver — it’s like frantically “trawling around the bottom of a messy purse for a missing set of keys.”

By the end, however, I was somewhat confused as to the larger thrust of “When in French.” Foreign languages do not seem to pose that terrible a threat to Collins’s relationship, and thus the stakes of the enterprise feel low. The absence of a stronger plot engine also left me noticing how little world events or politics, even those in Europe, intrude — especially for a book that is about an American understanding foreign cultures, and especially at a time when the internet has brought so many faraway events into everyone’s homes. Collins, a staff writer at The New Yorker, has covered everything from Brexit to the Slovenian origins of Melania Trump to France’s labor laws. I can’t decide whether such political omissions in her memoir are an admirable measure of writerly restraint or a reflection of the isolating and anesthetizing experience of living in Geneva. (Collins now lives with her family in Paris.) Her book can sometimes feel like a time capsule from another era, when going abroad meant only one thing: a great romance.