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Revision as of 19:47, 23 January 2025 by Ira Leviton (talk | contribs) (Fixed the image in the infobox. Please see Category:Pages using infoboxes with thumbnail images.)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)2023 travel book by John Adamson and Clive Jackson
 Footloose in France book cover, showing a portion of an oil on canvas painting of Saint-Jean-de-Luz by Albert Marquet | |
| Authors | John Adamson and Clive Jackson |
|---|---|
| Illustrator | George Adamson (1913–2005) (frontispiece) |
| Cover artist | Albert Marquet (1875–1947) |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Travel writing |
| Set in | Pyrénées-Atlantiques and Paris, France |
| Published | Cambridge |
| Publisher | John Adamson Books |
| Publication date | 2023 |
| Publication place | United Kingdom |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 214 |
| ISBN | 978-1-898565-18-5 |
| Dewey Decimal | 944.0830922 |
| Website | Book on publisher's website |
Footloose in France (2023) is a travel book by the British authors John Adamson and Clive Jackson. They recall with humour their separate experiences of living in France in the mid-to-late sixties and early seventies: Jackson worked in the western Pyrenees and Adamson in Paris.
The book, whose prologue and epilogue are set in West Mersea, recounts Jackson and Adamson's French adventures, the recollection of which is sparked by the unexpected brightness of a late summer's afternoon at the Essex seaside resort, as if they were back in France.
Description
The alternate tales the authors tell are true reminiscences of a France of decades ago. There are insights into the worlds of wine-making, art and film, the challenges of language teaching, translating, banking, balloon-selling and much more. Encounters with Alain Delon, Piem, the cartoonist, Louis Derbré, the sculptor, Toru Iwaya, the Japanese mezzotint artist, Modigliani's daughter, and across the tables in a Provençal restaurant, Noël Coward, are mingled with interactions with the locals in the foothills of the Pyrenees, and exchanges with workers, among them waiters, barbers and business executives, in Paris. Falling in love at a château in the Pomerol, putting on an exhibition of Franco-British humorous art in the Marais and discovering a letter in Paris written by Vincent van Gogh to Paul Gauguin are among the highlights of the book.
Through the memories of those they meet the reader is transported back to the Algerian War; to the occupation of Paris in the Second World War; to the quandary of a young French doctor working at Buchenwald in the aftermath of the War; and more recently to the behaviour of the CRS in the Paris riots of May 1968.
While there is innocence in the reactions of the authors as callow youths, it is tempered with their later wisdom and reflections as they look back, at times self-deprecatingly, to a spell in France that helped shape their lives.
The book's frontispiece reproduces Tuileries Gardens, Paris, a painting by George Adamson, father of one of the authors.
Reception
The book has been hailed as having "all the quirky fun of an authentic adventure, a trove of fascinating real-life tales – whilst it reveals the real France in all its remarkable differentness". Sir Quentin Blake found the incidents and experiences sympathetic to him and induced "a measure of nostalgia". The booksellers Hatchards on Piccadilly, London, dubbed the book, "A beautiful portrayal of the country from an outsider's perspective".
References
- A seaside town near Colchester in Essex. See prologue, pp. 7–8 and epilogue, pp. 209–12.
- Chapters 11 and 15.
- Chapter 47, p. 207.
- ^ Chapter 43.
- Chapter 33.
- See Jeanne Modigliani.
- Chapter 46. Les Baux-de-Provence.
- Such as at La Coupole, Montparnasse, where, as described in the book, a version of Derbré's sculpture La Terre is given pride of place.
- Chapters 9 and 17.
- Chapter 4. At Château Beauregard.
- Letter 739, now held in the archives of the musée Réattu, Arles (inv. no. 114480).
- Chapter 18, p. 94.
- Chapter 5, pp. 27–8; chapter 43, p. 184.
- Chapter 43, pp. 190–1.
- Chapter 11, p. 65.
- Anne Garvey, “Footloose in France: Book review", Cambridge Critique, 29 September 2023.
- See Quentin Blake's full comment on the book's page on the publisher's website.
- Waterstones. Accessed 21 January 2025.