SOAF at Shakespeare & Co
Two of our members are performing readings this month at Shakespeare and Company, 37 rue de la Bûcherie, 5e (opposite Notre Dame), Mo Saint-Michel, 00 33 (0) 1 43 25 40 93, www.shakespeareandcompany.com , which may interest you if you are in or near Paris:
7pm Monday August 3rd: Lucy Wadham, The Secret Life of France
7pm Monday August 10th: Gregor Dallas, Metrostop Paris and ‘Impossible Love: Abelard and Héloise’
7pm Monday August 3rd
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Tonight Lucy Wadham will read from The Secret Life of France (highly recommended by Shakespeare and Company). This is Lucy’s first work of non-fiction, and is a candid and funny account of her long and tumultuous love affair with France, her adoptive land. At the age of eighteen Wadham ran away from English boys - who she found emotionally immature and sexually unconfident - and into the arms of a Frenchman. She soon discovered that romantic relationships in France were fraught with their own set of problems: not only do the French put women on a pedestal, but both sexes are required to act out the sort of seduction games that disappeared from English society centuries ago. Wadham, who dressed in Doc Martens and baggy jumpers, struggled to fit in ...
Twenty-five years later, having married in a French Catholic church, put her children through the French education system and divorced in a French court of law, Wadham examines the profound and varied differences between the Anglo-Saxon and French worldviews. Using her own experience, as a wife and mother, and later as an investigative journalist for the BBC, Wadham explores French attitudes towards sex, marriage, adultery, money, work, happiness, war and race, and in so doing reveals much about our own priorities and the nature of our identity.
The Secret Life of France challenges our preconceptions and debunks many of the myths - bleak and rosy - on which our view of France rests.
Lucy Wadham was born in London in 1964 and educated at Oxford. She lives in France with her four children. Lost, her first novel, was published in 2000 to great acclaim. Other novels include Castro’s Dream and Greater Love. Visit Lucy's blog at www.secretlifeofrance.com for everything you ever wanted to know about France but were afraid to ask.
7pm Monday August 10th
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Gregor Dallas (www.gd-frontiers.net) author of Metrostop Paris, will be speaking on ‘The Impossible Love: Abelard and Héloise’, reading extracts from their medieval correspondence.
Dallas’s Metrostop Paris, wrote The Guardian, ‘is actually an entertaining history of ideas masquerading as a travel guide, and, as if parodying the genre, Dallas tells us not only which streets to go down and where to have lunch, but which waitress to fall in love with.’ Dallas told stories around twelve Metrostops in Paris: love stories, birth stories, philosophical stories, battle stories and death stories.
But his talk tonight will focus on the Metrostop that was not included in the book, Metrostop Saint-Michel, heart of the Latin Quarter, where the Latin-speaking clerks of the Church used to congregate, and the home of that love story, perhaps the most famous in the Western world.
We all love love stories, especially the unhappy ones. This is the unhappiest of them all, the Impossible Love – told with the panache of an expert on the subject. As Pope puts in the mouth of Héloise:
‘Not Caesar’s empress would I deign to prove;
No, make me mistress to the man I love;
If there be yet another name more free,
More fond than mistress, make me that to thee!'
But things go desperately wrong…
7pm Monday August 3rd: Lucy Wadham, The Secret Life of France
7pm Monday August 10th: Gregor Dallas, Metrostop Paris and ‘Impossible Love: Abelard and Héloise’
7pm Monday August 3rd
----------------------------------------------------------
Tonight Lucy Wadham will read from The Secret Life of France (highly recommended by Shakespeare and Company). This is Lucy’s first work of non-fiction, and is a candid and funny account of her long and tumultuous love affair with France, her adoptive land. At the age of eighteen Wadham ran away from English boys - who she found emotionally immature and sexually unconfident - and into the arms of a Frenchman. She soon discovered that romantic relationships in France were fraught with their own set of problems: not only do the French put women on a pedestal, but both sexes are required to act out the sort of seduction games that disappeared from English society centuries ago. Wadham, who dressed in Doc Martens and baggy jumpers, struggled to fit in ...
Twenty-five years later, having married in a French Catholic church, put her children through the French education system and divorced in a French court of law, Wadham examines the profound and varied differences between the Anglo-Saxon and French worldviews. Using her own experience, as a wife and mother, and later as an investigative journalist for the BBC, Wadham explores French attitudes towards sex, marriage, adultery, money, work, happiness, war and race, and in so doing reveals much about our own priorities and the nature of our identity.
The Secret Life of France challenges our preconceptions and debunks many of the myths - bleak and rosy - on which our view of France rests.
Lucy Wadham was born in London in 1964 and educated at Oxford. She lives in France with her four children. Lost, her first novel, was published in 2000 to great acclaim. Other novels include Castro’s Dream and Greater Love. Visit Lucy's blog at www.secretlifeofrance.com for everything you ever wanted to know about France but were afraid to ask.
7pm Monday August 10th
----------------------------------------------------------
Gregor Dallas (www.gd-frontiers.net) author of Metrostop Paris, will be speaking on ‘The Impossible Love: Abelard and Héloise’, reading extracts from their medieval correspondence.
Dallas’s Metrostop Paris, wrote The Guardian, ‘is actually an entertaining history of ideas masquerading as a travel guide, and, as if parodying the genre, Dallas tells us not only which streets to go down and where to have lunch, but which waitress to fall in love with.’ Dallas told stories around twelve Metrostops in Paris: love stories, birth stories, philosophical stories, battle stories and death stories.
But his talk tonight will focus on the Metrostop that was not included in the book, Metrostop Saint-Michel, heart of the Latin Quarter, where the Latin-speaking clerks of the Church used to congregate, and the home of that love story, perhaps the most famous in the Western world.
We all love love stories, especially the unhappy ones. This is the unhappiest of them all, the Impossible Love – told with the panache of an expert on the subject. As Pope puts in the mouth of Héloise:
‘Not Caesar’s empress would I deign to prove;
No, make me mistress to the man I love;
If there be yet another name more free,
More fond than mistress, make me that to thee!'
But things go desperately wrong…
posted by SOAF Chairman at 10:08 AM
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