Almost twenty years ago I read The Piano Shop on the Left Bank (2001) by Thad Carhart.
It is a well trodden genre. British or American writer goes to live in France and writes a whimsical memoir about the experience. I admit I enjoyed Peter Mayle’s gossamer confection, A Year in Provence, and Dirk Bogarde’s memoirs about his sojourn in the south of France. The piano shop is higher calibre and you don’t have to be interested in pianos to enjoy an absorbing memoir, although you will end up knowing a whole lot more about them. Highly recommended.
Now I am reading Jeremy Mercer’s Books, Baguettes & Bedbugs (2005). Mercer is a Canadian crime journalist who had to leave town in a hurry in 1999. A fondness for drink and drugs and an indiscretion about a thief that appeared in print made him hightail it to Charles de Gaulle and a small room on the sixth floor in Porte de Clignancourt – the northern terminus of line 4 in the 18th Arrondissement. Even this was too expensive and by serendipity Mercer becomes a dosser at an eccentric bookshop on the left bank across the Seine from the Île de la Cité, opposite Notre-Dame. You don’t have to like books to enjoy his story; again highly recommended.
