Ransacking Paris (Patti Miller, UQP)

This delightful recollection of the rewarding year that writer Patti Miller spent in Paris completing a challenging manuscript is that rare object—a book for anyone who believes we don’t need any more expat memoirs. Miller’s year in Paris is, naturally, spent wrestling with the language, with her book, with a difficult, tiny apartment (which she manages to leave for a more suitable one) and with her ambition to sing in a local choir. However, her horizons are much wider, as she makes the acquaintance of her beloved French writers ‘at home’, as it were. She imagines having coffee with Rousseau, Voltaire, Montaigne, Simone de Beauvoir,  Madame de Sévigné and others as she introduces the reader to each one in a few illuminating pages. Her husband and two almost-adult sons come and go throughout the narrative, as do the women who give her French conversation practice and become friends, particularly the delightful Vicky, who lends the family her romantic ancestral farm. A clever writer, Miller allows the many distractions of Paris to panic us into believing that she will never finish the manuscript, which almost becomes another character in this book. The combination of literary history and domestic detail sets the book above its rivals. Any Francophile should love it.

Max Oliver is a retired Australian bookseller and enthusiastic traveller