"A Year In The Merde" by Stephen Clarke

This is a hilarious book about an Englishman living in Paris! It's a quick read. I finished it in a day and a half and I'm not known for my fast reading. As with most things, I imagine you feel the hilarity and irony of the situations much more profoundly if you have also experienced similar things yourself, but I'm sure reading this book could be an enjoyable experience for anyone. I've read other books of this type (the Peter Mayle books about Provence and a book called "C'est La Vie" about an American woman in Paris) but this one distinguishes itself and is above all my favorite of the group. It includes lots of your standard clichés such as the strangeness of kissing, dog poop on the streets, rude service sector workers, strikes, sexy French women, intolerance of cultural differences, but presents them in its own unique way. For one, the story is fictionalized. It's apparently based on the writer's personal experiences, but the main character's name is Paul West. West comes to Paris to work for a French company on a project to start up a chain of tea rooms called "My Tea Is Rich" (you probably don't find this funny, neither did Paul, but the French do because a classic phrase from the dark ages of English teaching is "My tailor is rich", all French people know at least that much English). There are also juicy bits about the character's sexual exploits with Parisian ladies and though the language is sometimes rather crude and blunt, it is quite funny. Some of the really good laughs came from his phonetic renderings of sounds coming from French people's mouths when they were attempting to speak English. Let's try a little interactive activity. I'll give you the phonetic rendering, and you translate into real English. Ok? Here goes:
1. Alok for wah toowa king wizioo.
2. Ah'm ed of hah tee.
I also enjoyed his attempts at using his dictionary to decipher newspaper apartment adds, as in this passage where an apartment is advertized as including a "SàM avec cuis amér": "My dictionary told me that this probably meant it was suitable for sado-masochists with bitter (amer) thighs (cuisses). However, I suspected that this might not be an accurate translation. Interactive activity 2: can you figure out the proper translation?
This would probably be a good airplane, or other form of travel, book. There's a sequel called "Merde, Actually" that I'm going to read sometime soon though I hear it's not as good. I'll keep you posted.