In more than 300 pages, nobody tells a joke. Nobody does much work. Nobody sits and eats and enjoys their food. You've lived all your life in America, never attended a megachurch or a brothel, don't own guns, are non-Amish, and it dawns on you that this is a book about the French. There's no reason for it to exist in English, except as evidence that travel need not be broadening and one should be wary of books with Tocqueville in the title.The book is called "American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville." (You can read the first chapter here.)
Keillor:
Lévy is quite comfortable with phrases like "as always in America." Bombast comes naturally to him. Rain falls on the crowd gathered for the dedication of the Clinton library in Little Rock, and to Lévy, it signifies the demise of the Democratic Party. As always with French writers, Lévy is short on the facts, long on conclusions....No matter how many words beginning with D in a sentence there may be...
America is changing, he concludes, but America will endure. "I still don't think there's reason to despair of this country. No matter how many derangements, dysfunctions, driftings there may be . . .
"no matter how fragmented the political and social space may be; despite this nihilist hypertrophy of petty antiquarian memory; despite this hyperobesity - increasingly less metaphorical - of the great social bodies that form the invisible edifice of the country; despite the utter misery of the ghettos . . . I can't manage to convince myself of the collapse, heralded in Europe, of the American model."Ha. This reminds me of a book in my half-read books collection: "America," by Jean Baudrillard. I got some ways into it -- I was seriously trying to read it, you know, doing that thing readers do where we submit to merging our mind with the mind of another human being -- and I just had to shake myself out of it and say nothing here rings true.
Thanks, pal. I don't imagine France collapsing anytime soon either. Thanks for coming.
Hmmm.... "America" has a blurb from a NYT book review on the back. "Since de Tocqueville...."
IN THE COMMENTS: An interesting process of melllowing on Lévy!
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21 comments:
That same author wrote a book about baseball, and his trip to Cooperstown, that made me wonder whether he had in fact ever watched a game. I'm tempted to draw conclusions about the French, but wouldn't that mean imitating this author, who I so clearly dislike?
Withering is a great adjective to describe this hilarious panning of a book that must be so bad that you want to run out and buy it to see if anything can really be that bad.
Definitely something to check out the library. The public library, that American invention. Wonder if Levy ever went in one and saw fat people?
vw: kwzlpic
I believe this is book is an expansion (if not identical) to a 3 part series Levy wrote for The Atlantic Monthly last year. My only lingering memory of the articles was every week the Atlantic hosted letter after letter from people Levy supposedly experienced horribleness with who denied his accounts almost entirely.
Keillor is the perfect choice to pimp slap this fool. Brovo to the Times for putting him on the case.
Nothing like bad French writing to unite Americans left and right.
Wow, that can stand side-by-side with any zero star Ebert review, though he failed to say "I hated this book. Hated, hated, hated, hated, hated..."
Off to get a Freedom Dip w/ Au Jus sauce for lunch.
I just had to shake myself out of it and say nothing here rings true
As my wife says when something is not really delicious, "I would rather not waste the calories."
He worships Woody Allen and Charlie Rose
shoo. 'nuff said
From the Keillor review:
He admires Warren Beatty, though he sees Beatty at a public event "among these rich and beautiful who, as always in America . . . form a masquerade of the living dead, each one more facelifted and mummified than the next, fierce, a little mutant-looking, inhuman, ultimately disappointing."
That's funny ('cause there's truth at the core).
Don't you think this Freedom Fry thing has gone far enough? Or did you put this story in here just to keep your pet hyenas in a froth until the next Alito story? Why don't you at least turn on "The Bachelor" on Monday nights, so you can see what Paris looks like.
Yes, Ricardo, that Garrison Keillor is a real France-bashing, Fox news watching, rightwing, Red State nutcase. Good thing you're a bit more sophisticated than he.
When Guy Noir gets you, you're got.
I guess Frenchy never made it to Lake Wobegon.
I grew up in Lake Wobegon. It's a fabulous place to be from.
As an adult, I've travelled and I hope that in my case it was broadening.
Part of that "travel", either of the virtual or geographical sort, has been contact with Europeans that are utterly convinced that Americans do not travel, therefore they do not *know*. I don't blame most of them for what amounts to elitism, but I'd suggest that focusing on Europe or France is outmoded... conservative, even. As though those places are more important to sophisticated understanding of the world than Asia or Central America or Australia.
Would I be enriched by knowing what Paris looks like? Certainly, though if I were given a choice I'd see what some other place looked like. Tokyo, probably, with maybe a side trip to Vladivostok.
Professor Althouse doesn't have any frothing pet hyenas- just frothing squirrels. And she rarely deploys them because they are not entirely trustworthy.
I read the excerpts in the Atlantic. I liked them.
I remember Henri explaining the American system of health care as being more complicated than the French, but just about as universal.
I thought it was pretty complimentary of the U.S. but what do I know? I grew up in Jesusland and we're all pretty dim.
Jimbo
There was a good size puff piece in the LA Times last Sunday about this author and his latest book.
I had my own take on the article (I can't claim to have read the book, or to have any interest in doing so).
As Elizabeth said earlier in the comments, "Nothing like bad French writing to unite Americans left and right."
Ziemer- You don't have to hate America (or France for that matter) to misunderstand it. That said, I'd have to read Levy's book to pass any judgment on it. I sort of like Levy, in that he's a good antidote to the repugnant and ridiculous Baudrillard. George Will wrote of Levy:
"Levy considers himself "of the left," but only because, he unhelpfully explains, of "my sensibility." However, he calls himself "anti-anti-American" and argues that the most virulent and long-lived French anti-Americanism is on the political right.
The left's anti-Americanism, which Levy calls "a routine of resentment," is a faded, almost perfunctory residue of a failed prophecy -- Marxist puerilities, the dated nature of which is not disguised by recasting the caricature of America in the vocabulary of anti-globalization. The right's anti-Americanism is more serious and passionate, for two reasons: It is an echo of fascism, which actually has more residual vitality than Marxism does. And the loathing of America, although morally obtuse, is at least a recoil against what America really is."
I think there's a germ of truth in this assessment- the undercurrent of xenophobic and fascistic tendencies in the general French character should not be ignored.
I quite like the characterization of leftist anti-Americanism as "a routine of resentment".
Author is scheduled to appear today Sunday on C-Span2 3:58pm est
Ziemer: I've been thinking the same thing. Isn't this the way Bill Bryson does his books? Did Bryson understand Australia or did he just work up his notes? Whatever -- "In a Sunburned Country" is a great read.
You earnestly tried to read Baudrillard?
My condolences; I gave up not even a chapter into "The Transparency of Evil". (And I believe, but am not sure, that I at one point attempted "America" or read some excerpts therefrom, with more success, but no more pleasure.)
I can only hope with utmost sincerity that he's more comprehensible in the original French. In English translation, at any rate, the man simply cannot express... anything, clearly and simply.
(This is forgiveable, of course, to some extent, when speaking of things that are very complex and muddied, but the better writers and philosophers - in whose ranks he is variously classed - have done a far better job.
The obvious example would be Nietzsche, who confuses his readers with his ideas rather than his expression of them, in most cases.)
Having watched the CSPAN discussion between Levy and Kristol, Levy isn't anti-American, but he came across as reflexively anti-Bush, anti-faith, and for a self described 'intellectual', ill informed.
Plus his formulation of ideas in English don't translate well.
It might have been a problem with speaking extemporaneously as a francophone, and his prose could be superior, but I doubt it.
What prose I've read was similar to his wandering speech.
The discussion was hosted by ,SAIS, and the backdrop directly behind Levy in the camera shot featured part of the word, Bologna, and that's what I thought most of the time he was speaking, baloney.
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