In Love with Tiny Tables

So I just returned from touring France in support of Wilderness.  A short, small tour that opened with a literary festival at St. Malo, which is in Brittany, and which, I’m told, is lovely.  I saw very little of the physical landscape—the Atlantic, the old city walls, the last resting place of Chateaubriand on its little tidal island—because my time was spent engaged with readers.  With speaking to and meeting people. With talking about Wilderness and why I wrote it and how it happened.  I think, in the end, I got the better of the deal.  Over the next few weeks, I’ll be writing a bit about how I found things Over There but, for now, suffice to say I went and came back and some of these things may have happened:

First and foremost I overpacked—badly—and my bags became anchors round my neck that I schlepped through train stations and crammed into the backs of taxis.  I ruined one pair of shoes, looked extremely fat on French television, met a famous French film director (who went on to buy a copy of my book!), and I ate warm noodles out of a cold carton on the Boulevard St. Michel in Paris.  I did not see the Alps but I did see the clouds obscuring them and I saw vast fields of brilliantly yellow Colza from the windows of fast-moving trains.

I drank one skunky beer and almost got into a fistfight with a hooligan.  I took to wearing scarves and may have eaten a prune yet still lived to tell the tale. I definitely ate foie gras and considered trying snails but settled for duck.  I ate chocolate like a fiend and I drank small coffees at tiny tables with my legs crossed and the wind upon my face and I felt writerly.  I felt fine.

In Voiron, in the shadow of the Alps I could not see, I got to read a page of Wilderness aloud to a French author.  This was good.  What was better was listening to a pretty girl read another section aloud in French.  What was best was the meal afterwards.

I went to Notre Dame and stood in awe and touched old, worked stone and breathed the stillest, holiest air I’ve ever tasted.  I saw my little book in the windows of shops all over the south of France and was humbled and privileged at every stop.  I talked Napoleonics with a self-avowed communist who, even still, believed in the Great Man theory of history and I was overawed by the high-seriousness and the real, breathing humanity of French bookstores.  I appeared on French radio and got them to play a KISS song and, in Lyons, I stepped from a cab and threw my back out so badly it may still be there, flopping around on the cobbles.

All these things and more—things I’ll write about and things I won’t—will stay with me, I think.  They’ll stick.  Because, on that trip, I had some of my very best days, sitting at tiny tables, sipping coffee, feeling fine.

• May 30, 2013
• Uncategorized
• 2 Comments