Word: frenchness
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...Punches are fine, but no closeups of broken jaws; throw a guy off a rooftop, but don't show him landing impaled on an obelisk. Rush Hour 3 observes these niceties while twitting another MPAA rule: no four-letter words. In an early scene where Carter is interrogating a French-speaking thug through an interpreter, he gets exasperated and shouts: "You tell this piece of s-word that I will personally f-word him up." Excellent solution...
...have been at odds over everything from war to health-care systems, a group of writers from both countries has attempted a similar bit of serendipity, this time to help revive the corpse of Franco-American understanding. As You Were Saying, a slim volume dreamed up by French and U.S. cultural mandarins and published by America's Dalkey Archive Press, contains seven works of short fiction - or twice that many, depending on how you count. Seven prominent French authors were asked to contribute the beginnings of a story. Each tale was then given to an American writer to complete, revise...
...results would have delighted the Surrealists. Aside from being great fun, As You Were Saying undermines literary stereotypes of the pop-culture-obsessed, narrative-driven Americans and the introspective, abstract-minded French. If the names had been switched, you couldn't tell who wrote what. Consider the book's first pairing: a ripped-from-the-headlines story by France's Marie Darrieussecq about a woman whose lover receives a full-face transplant; then an inside-out version by Rick Moody, who retells it from the man's point of view. "One day I woke to find that...
...postmodern French self-reference, try Grégoire Bouillier's portrait of a man trying to forget a lost love; it actually mentions the California writer whose job it is to finish the story. "Neither the Pope nor Percival Everett, no, no one will die in your place," a character muses. Then Everett one-ups Bouillier by turning the hero's metaphorical search for a place in the world into a real quest for comfortable footwear...
...match for Sarajevo-born American Aleksandar Hemon's moving account of an immigrant door-to-door salesman working the Chicago suburbs. France's Lydie Salvayre spins a ho-hum tale of a man with an untamable cowlick, and Rikki Ducornet responds with a limp portrait of the aging French cancan dancer La Goulue. But then, all of the writers in As You Were Saying (and their translators) contributed their services without pay. It is easy to imagine that some of the stories were dashed off not to be enduring literary masterpieces but merely to provoke and delight...