Review by Debra Ollivier

Shit happens. Really happens. Just ask Paul West, Stephen Clarke's fictional alter-ego in “A Year in the Merde.” A young British executive, West goes to France to open a line of tea shops. But before he can even step foot in his office, he steps foot in, well, dog shit. And so begins a series of close encounters of the scatological kind in the streets of Paris that preoccupy West. In fact West is so pre-occupied by dog poop he buys a large stock of cheap North Korean tennis shoes in an act of civic self-defense (“I pooped them up for a day and chucked them in a bin”) and gives us more stats than we need to know about the 650 Parisians who end hospitalized “after somersaulting over a sample of the 15 tons of poop dumped on the city's streets by its 200, 000 dogs.” He even has the lucidity to ask of a female suitor, “How could a self-respecting Parisienne fancy someone whose only topic of conversation was the rear end of dogs?”

Once we've gotten all that out of the way, the shit really hits the fan. West's encounters with the usual round of annoying French colleagues (do they ever get any work done?) and his entanglements with an unctuous right-wing boss lead him into an unexpected ring of political corruption. When West is not avoiding dog shit or trying to get shagged (Brit-speak for get laid), he's increasingly embroiled in a plot that involves a country house, a group of provincial rednecks, and his unsated libido - all of which is the perfect set-up for waxing poetic on the unnerving qualities of the French.

Anyone who's lived long enough among the French will be amused - and at times laugh out loud - at West's observations: The lunacy of their bureaucracy, their chronic complaining (or as West puts it, the “symphony in B-moaner”), their strikes, their crazy drivers, their annoying protocols (cutting lettuce with a fork is “punishable by death”), their scary sausages and their “je m'en foutism” - or that particularly French brand of I-don't-give-a-damnism. For expatriates in Paris -- that uprooted community of wayward souls in constant flux across the Hexagon -- there is wickedly cathartic pleasure to be had in West's comic dilemmas; ditto on the amusing Franco-English linguistic quips that trip West up. However woe be those readers who either don't know enough French to appreciate these quips, or those who haven't stayed long enough in Paris to get beyond, well, the dog shit.

And herein lies the book's potential Achilles heel - for Clarke must rise beyond cultural stereotypes in order to reach a wide body of readers, and one can't help but wonder if he's cast a wide enough net. That said, with book rights sold in eleven countries, his publishers seem to be banking on it.

Having lived in Paris for ten years and been married to a French man for even longer, I personally enjoyed Clarke's book. It was a guilty expat pleasure. Clarke's book is an antidote to the annoying fetishization of French culture, which may explain why you'll find this disclaimer on its cover: “There are lots of French people who are not at all hypocritical, inefficient, treacherous, intolerant, adulterous or incredibly sexy… They just didn't make it into my book.” Presumably those people are the ones you will find in Peter Mayle's “A Year in Province.” The irony here hits you over the head with a Le Creuset frying pan.

In the end, West finagles his way through a labyrinth of confusion, gets fired from his job, gets a girl, and seems poised to whip out another adventure as a hapless expatriate in the land of cheese-eaters and dog poop. How far up shit's proverbial creek will he get without a paddle? A suivre…

Debra Ollivier is the author of Enter Nous: A Woman's Guide to Finding Her Inner French Girl.