A collection of twenty pieces that appeared in The New Yorker beginning in 1944. Steegmuller describes visits to various French towns before the war, what it was like immediately after the war (rationing, mine location, and other matters), and then includes a few pieces that were written about places (usually the States) other than France.
He talks about French provincial life and about the French attitude toward camping before the war (not civilized—not French). He describes the French inability to understand the notion of a temporary (one year) installation of a telephone and the bureaucracy that attaches to the installation and listing of a phone (“Allo, Allo”), as well as other bureaucratic annoyances.
A sad little tale (“Bereft”) recounts a French couple’s wish to hear from their daughter in Idaho, whose American husband wrote to say she was being institutionalized, and the revelation that their son also lives in Idaho, a hundred miles away, and that they, too, have lived in the States, but in New York, never venturing more than a few blocks from the hotel where they worked.
“The Foreigner” describes, in the taxi driver and the commissaire of police, the xenophobia of the French bourgeois.
The non-French entries here include experiences on a bus trip in the Southwest, more trouble with apartments and moving, and a couple of strange pieces about horseback riding and a municipal snake charmer in Cairo.
Steegmuller was a translator and a Flaubert scholar; I believe the first time I read Madame Bovary it was in his translation. ( )