Even a traffic cop at first entirely hostile to L? who has committed the crime of stopping
Posted in General on 30. Aug, 2010
Even a traffic cop, at first entirely hostile to L? who has committed the crime of stopping for wee on the highway, breaks into enthusiastic sympathy when L? explains in obscure defence of his bodily needs that he’s writing a book based on the Frenchman’s journey.Second, L? is anti-anti-American, to a degree that drives his countrymen to apoplexy and drives L? himself to adopting some rather tortuously untenable defences. “I do not think that a French magazine would ask an American writer to do this,” he says grandly, “or even an English writer, such as Salman Rushdie, or Martin Amis.” This, he contends, is a function of European chauvinism, which he despises.America’s embrace of this Frenchman is perhaps less surprising than it might appear. For his theories, such insight is important, because he also accepts that no matter how much it is feared or resented by the French and many others, it is the US, with its massive political and cultural influence, that is the mother-lode today for Western identity of all stripes (so to speak).For L?, the very fact that he was commissioned by the US magazine Atlantic Monthly to undertake this project, is proof of the nation’s munificence. Above all, what he wanted to understand was how the US manages to promote so successfully its myth of itself, and confer on its inhabitants, no matter how diverse, a sense of belonging. The result is his strange and satisfying new book, part travelogue, part meditation on what it means to be American, and part disquisition on the perils of post-September 11 US foreign policy.The book was inspired by L?’s frustration with his own country’s rabid anti-Americanism, which grated with him before the New York and Pentagon atrocities, and grates more now. He retraced the 1831 journey of the French social-scientist Alexis de Tocqueville, which formed the basis for the latter’s prescient, two-volume masterpiece Democracy in America, to see how many of Tocqueville’s observations and predictions remain valid in the US today.
Our business, Bernard’s and mine, however, is not in Morocco. We’re here instead to talk about his latest book, American Vertigo, which has found itself nestling of late – rather improbably for a French writer whose work remains, more often than not, untranslated into English – high in the US bestseller lists.Given his rarefied lifestyle, and his intellectual ambitions, it’s refreshing to learn that L? appears to have harboured one or two normal, or even clich? dreams. Like countless frustrated suburbanites and endless romantic bohemians, he has undertaken a pan-American road trip. Not for him, though, the camper-van with the kids in the back, or even the pastel convertible with his girl by his side. L?’s year-long perambulations followed a rather more cerebral pattern.
Perhaps L?’s vanity is expressed in his presumption, at 57, that he doesn’t have to make an effort in order to look presentable. If so, it’s a relaxed and friendly vanity, rather than the competitive, obsessive sort.And relaxed and friendly is what L? indeed seems to be We’re not, it turns out for a start, in a nameless anywhere “How absurd,” he says “Being in Marrakesh That is no problem, of course. Being in Marrakesh? Just my home – I don’t want people to know where my home is, or what it is like.” Which is fair enough.So we’re in the Caf?e France, in Place Djamal Afna, the biggest, most vibrant square in the city. Hawkers are hawking, tumblers are tumbling, beggars are begging, and the souk is gearing up for the evening’s business.
And then, to an explosion of Madonna, the models burst forth.The designs are not destined for the shops, but instead are intended to celebrate the brand’s past and future A riot of knitted colour makes its way down the catwalk. Multi-hued models are festooned in striped sweater dresses, swirling skirts and voluminous ponchos. Knitted dreads poke out underneath tea-cosy Rasta hats; pom-poms adorn models dripping wool from every limb. The audience laps it up and when the Benetton siblings step on to the catwalk to a cover of “Dream On”, by Depeche Mode, they get a standing ovation. 8pm From the fifth floor of the Pompidou Centre, the Eiffel Tower is at its twinkling best. The Prosecco is flowing and waiters are handing round autumnal nibbles before the gala dinner.