Sunday 13 February 2011

like every frenchwoman

Because A) it is good manners and B) it is professionally sensible, I try to avoid offending people. So I am not naming names here. But a review I've just read, in a proper newspaper, opens:
How can you not like a heroine who invents lascivious confessions to shock the priest and finds that kneeling in church makes “naughtiness” spring to her mind?

She is French, of course ... She straddles a motorcycle with “thrilled and shivering limbs,” commits adultery (and possibly incest) to the rhythms of the Lord’s Prayer and, like every Frenchwoman I have ever observed, approaches food like a lyric courtesan
My reading of this: a banally fetishised description of a Frenchwoman as reviewed by someone with a banal, fetishistic idea of Frenchwomen. I might be wrong.

2 comments:

John Finnemore said...

My reading of your reading: as a typical timid repressed Englishman, you are afraid to admit even to yourself how awesomely sexy all Frenchwomen are, all the time. Your loss, mon ami.

John Finnemore said...

(Oh, and yeah, yeah, Zimbabwe or whatever. All I'm saying is 'Hudson' doesn't sound very African to me.)