Finding Fontainebleau: An American Boy in France

Several years ago I read Julia Child's memoir of her time in France in the immediate post-war years, My Life in France, which is one of the finest memoirs I've read to date. Naturally, then, Finding Fontainebleau, jumped out at me from the pages of a recent Publisher's Weekly. So first:

Thad Carhart was four-years-old when his father was stationed in France as part of the NATO command. The entire family lived in Fontainebleau for three years, during which Thad started school (becoming "Ted" in the process, as Thad proved impossible to render, as he explains in a humorous anecdote), a good, but naughty, student. In Finding Fontainebleau, Carhart looks back on those three years - a giant Chevy station wagon, a brood of five rambunctious children, and a France still awakening from the nightmare that was World War II - while also weaving in the history of Fontainebleau, and by extension the kings and emperors of France. (Side note: it is to my great regret that I have not yet visited Fontainebleau. If this book convinced me of anything, it is that I really must do so at the next opportunity.)

I enjoyed Carhart's style very much, although I found the steady stream of inserted French to be distracting. For me, it was distracting because I could read it, and so the translations served only to repeat what had read in the previous line. I'm not sure if it would be more or less distracting to a non-French speaker. And, while I enjoyed both the memoir aspect as well as the French history lessons, I felt these were often each so short as to be quite choppy. Carhart's interjections about his life in France since returning to live with his own in the late 1980s further served to heighten this sense for me. And, unfairly, I couldn't help but compare it to the incomparable My Life in France. This is entirely unreasonable, as one memoir is told from the perspective of an adult, while the other is a child's memories, but given the time and place, I couldn't help myself.

Francophiles will still, no doubt, enjoy this book. Carhart provides a particularly interesting look at the work of renovation in France and the work that goes into maintaining the country's patrimoine - the churches, chateaux, palaces, and even parks that make France, well, France. He does a great job distilling the cultural quirks of the French and capturing the old Paris of berets, pissotières, and baguettes.