If "what is UP with French people?" is a question you've ever asked yourself, you may be interested in reading Adam Gopnik's memoir of five years spent among them.

Gopnik starts out the book as a confirmed Francophile, scheming on a way to move to his beloved Paris. Personally, France has never really been my jam. But my mother gave me this book for Christmas, I needed a thing to read, and Gopnik's writing style kept me interested until the idea of FRANCE started to take on this interest for me that it had never had before.

So thanks a lot, mom, there's one more expensive European travel destination that I need to put on my list.

In seriousness, sometimes it's hard for me to get into stories about nice things that über-privileged people do, like moving to France while continuing to work for the New Yorker, but Gopnik isn't an a-hole about it and I really did enjoy the book while coming to fancy that I was acquiring an understanding-slash-appreciation for the French national character.

4 Stars = It definitely held my interest.

This is a book about an American who moves his family (wife, infant son) to Paris in 1995. They spend 5 years there, before going back to New York City. The author, Adam, has been enthralled by Paris since he was a child. So, being able to finally live there, and watch his son growing up there, is sheer bliss for him.

He writes random essays based on his experiences, and interests. He is not ashamed of being American, as some travel writers are, but he is also very aware of the joys of being Parisian. It's not a travelogue. This book makes you stop and think. I like that.

If you're an American living in a foreign country, you'll find Adam to be a level-headed friend who lets you glean much from his observations.

جستارهای مورد علاقه من:دیدار اتفاقی با دوست خیالی،دست آخر،صندلی راننده،مرد به دکتر مراجعه می کند

I read this book hoping for a nostalgic memoir that would excite me for and keep me company during my own trip to Paris. It delivered not only that, but also a breadth of thought-provoking musings on social-cultural anthropology.

The book's initial allure is, of course, the story it tells. A young couple makes the romantic decision to leave New York City behind and instead raise their small child in the city of lights: riding the carousel in the Luxembourg Gardens, marveling at the taxidermied animals on the Rue du Bac, and breakfasting on croissants et confiture. Throughout his retelling of those five idyllic years, Gopnik introduces a delightful and intriguing cast of characters, from the decades-tenured waiters at his favorite brasserie battling against new ownership, to the charming little girl with two blonde braids whom his son plays with at the pool every Wednesday, to the eccentric prosecutor at Maurice Papon's crimes against humanity trial who arrives at court every day on roller skates. He couches the ordinary details of day-to-day family life within the sublime moments of Old World beauty unique to Paris, in a way that made me simultaneously long for his experience yet feel as if I had been there with him and his family the entire time.

Along the way, the book turns more into a commentary on French culture, the features that make French culture unique, and, most interestingly, how these features compare and contrast and coexist with features of American culture. Gopnik muses on the frustrating adherence to bureaucratic regiments and rules, the regular occurrence of labor strikes, his struggle to find entertainment value in soccer, the captivating art of haute couture, the ease of obtaining medical care, the "crisis" in stubborn French cooking traditions, and so on. He puts forth fascinating insights, juxtapositions, and preferences that only an expat in his position has the experience to offer. I felt that these moments of commentary gave substance to his more idyllic memories and made Parisian life tangible.

"In Paris we have a beautiful existence but not a full life, and in New York we have a full life but an unbeautiful existence."

This line from "Paris to the Moon" has been rolling around my brain. The more it rolls, the more it resonates. It really is a great summing up of the expatriate life. I think anyone who has lived in France - anyone who has lived as an expatriate anywhere, really - will connect with this beautifully written book. It's structured as separate but connected essays, and I enjoyed this format more than I anticipated I would. Somehow Gopnik managed to create a narrative arc with this structure. Gopnik covers various aspects of Parisian/French life including food, fashion, sport, bureaucracy, child rearing and child birth, etc, often comparing and contrasting them to the American way of life. He entwines much of this with the adventures he has with his young son. His style feels more dense and literary than most other expatriate writing I've read, which I enjoyed.

I glanced through the reviews and noticed some readers thought the book felt a bit dated since Gopnik lived in Paris from 1995-2000. This sense of being anchored in a certain time period endeared the book to me because the time I spent in France was within those years. This is the France I recognize, including the infamous strikes of late 1995 which delayed my Christmas by mail until late January. Reading about this experience adds a lovely nostalgic glow to my memories.

A great book. I particularly enjoyed the way Adam Gopnik takes on the voice of a person who can both adore and appreciate the absurdity of any culture. A very realistic portrayal of the blending of cultures with all its pros and cons.

The writing is fantastic, loaded with literary and cultural allusions that are sure to introduce you to something new!

Just lovely. I skimmed a couple of chapters in the middle, about couture and French cooking. The most engaging essays by far were the ones about his family and their immersion in French life. Gopnik is a warm, witty, and textured writer. Reading this I realized all the charming eccentricities of Paris life make it a place I long to visit, but would probably not be able to live in.

This collection of essays from Adam Gopnik's five years in Paris with his wife and young child shimmers with insights about what it means to be French, which in turn illuminate what it means to be American. Gopnik is not for everyone. His prose can be too rich and meandering at times, but he is a keen observer of details and masterfully extracts larger meaning from the mundane. Like all the great expat writing about Paris, his insights come from a position of privilege that may not resonate with everyone, but I found myself repeatedly underlining sentences and phrases that seemed to capture essential truths ("le mot juste") in brilliant new ways. If you love Paris, this is a must-read, and even if you don't, there is much to appreciate here.

No review can properly do justice to Gopnik's beautiful writing, so I will end with his words, at the end of a meditation on the ineffable beauty of Paris on a winter evening, and the temporary relief such beauty can sometimes provide to our beleaguered, haunted souls:

"The hardest thing to convey is how lovely it all is and how that loveliness seems all you need. The ghosts that haunted you in New York or Pittsburgh will haunt you anywhere you go, because they're your ghosts and the house they haunt is you. But they become disconcerted, shaken confused for half a minute, and in that moment on a December at four o'clock when you're walking from the bus stop to the rue Saint-Dominique and the lights are twinkling across the river -- only twinkling to the bateaux-mouches, luring the tourists, but still . . . you feel as if you've escaped your ghosts if only because, being you, they're transfixed looking at the lights in the trees on the other bank, too, which they haven't seen before, either.

It's true that you can't run away from yourself. But we were right. You can run away."

I didn't realize that the book is actually a collection of essays about his time in Paris, as opposed to a more straight memoir style. And because of this style choice, I found I loved some of the essays, merely liked a few, and was bored by a few topics he chose to write about. He's undoubtedly a great writer and at times quite funny. A personal favorite was his essay on the Biblioteque Nationale. I do agree with other reviewers who feel he is a bit too precious about his son, and referring to him as his first and middle names, Luke Auden, is nothing short of pretentious.There is definitely too much about Luke that really only he and his wife would really care about. But in that sense he shows his New York-ness. Too many parents here are so unconscious about how little the rest of us really care about their children drinking grenadines, or playing in the gardens, or whatever mundane thing the kid is doing. I learned to skim some of the Luke chapters after awhile. Also eye-roll worthy are the times he tries to appear budget conscious while justifying to his audience why they joined the Ritz Carlton pool. Please. People with real budgets don't live in Paris for 5 years dining out all the time and swimming at the Ritz. Overall a good read, though sometimes the odd political essay can seem to come out of left field, and cause you to try and put it in context of the story at large.

This is an excellent, intelligent and emotional book that really sets a new bar for this kind of travel nonfiction. The author, an American writer, relates stories from the five years that he lived in Paris with his wife and young son. While Gopnick's musings on French mannerisms and cuisine are interesting, I particular enjoyed the stories about his young son Luke growing up very French and how that's occasionally difficult for his doting father. The events in Luke's early life, the puppet shows in Luxembourg Gardens, the crush on a classmate, learning about baseball from his father's bedtime stories, truly resonate. It's a lovely book with charming prose. It's a bit of a love letter to Paris, but it's also a moving tale about one family out of their element.

An utterly boring scope of minute differences between New York and Paris life. A definite sleeper, unless you consider this author's writing to be witty, which I did not.

Infarcisce le sue banalità di mille inutili aneddoti, ridondanti, autoreferenziali, sostanzialmente inutili.
Sempre con quella sensazione che stia pensando "come sono caratteristici questi francesi, ma meno male che sono americano".
Inciviltà spacciata per modernità&progresso.