Word: gallic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...hotel people and the police are all Gallic shrugs. Perhaps Madame has a lover? The American embassy is all bureaucracy. See that line over there, buddy? Well, go stand in it, and then we'll listen to your troubles. Walker, whose characterization Ford balances nicely between exasperation and desperation, is all thumbs. He does not speak the language, he never gets to sleep, eat or change his suit, and he keeps stumbling into situations in which he needs all the coordination and smarts that regular habits help to ensure. Hitch at least used to give Cary Grant and James Stewart...
Some skepticism may be permissible. The Gallic taste for abstractions and literary fun and games is not universally shared. And wordplay, no matter how winsome, does not travel well from one language to another. In any case, English-speaking readers can now examine Perec's most acclaimed book for themselves. At first glance, Life: A User's Manual looks every bit as good as the French have been saying it is for years...
...dress uniforms complete with immaculate stiff shirts and white ties, striding down the middle of the street with beautiful women on their arms. They might have been reclaiming the French Quarter. Later that week we heard the Captain being interviewed on a French language radio station. He sounded sutably Gallic and urbane but slightly bored, the retired imperialist paying his colonial social dues. Indeed, New Orleans is one of the few ports in the world where the French Navy can still feel like conquering heroes. The Captain was in his glory on Bourbon Street...
...there is far more than humor in this collection. The Fishermen of the Seine evokes, in a style as spare as Maupassant or Simenon, the ponts and iles of Paris at dawn, when rough-clad men hunker in the fog to hook Gallic mysteries like goujon, breme and chevaine. Two hunting pieces extracted from Humphrey's poignant 1977 memoir Farther Off from Heaven call back the hot dust and snaky swamps of his Depression-era boyhood in east Texas, along with the ghost of his hard-drinking, bar-fighting, trick-shot artist of a father...
...this overgrown bear of a little boy, this Ewok of genial lust. His eldest daughter (Fanny Ardant) is sympathetic but admonitory: "No man, especially a good man, can keep two women happy." He does, though. He keeps his daughters happy and his wife almost forgiving. In embracing these Gallic cliches, Next Summer creates an imaginary ideal family, one with adulteries, frustrations and near fatal diseases, but also love, loyalty, intelligence, passion, beauty. It's Father Knows Best in the French style...