There can be few situations more frustrating or beguiling for a writer than the one in which New Yorker staff writer Lauren Collins found herself, newlywed and newly relocated to Geneva, with little more than “bonjour” and “merci” to her name. When in French is Collins’s disarming account of finding her own identity in her husband’s mother tongue – a process she likens to “a sort of conversion” – while also undertaking a broader survey of the power of language (and language-learning) in shaping culture and experience. Fluently combining accounts of linguistic theory, historical anecdote, the arcane deliberations of the Académie and the inevitable unfortunate mistranslations – including telling her future mother-in-law that she had “given birth to – as in physically delivered, through the vagina – a coffee-machine” – When in French is a celebration both of the weird and compendious ingenuity of language, and of the value of maintaining a spirit of linguistic and emotional inquiry.
When in French is published by 4th Estate (£12.99). Click here to buy it for £10.65
