ARE THE FRENCH SUPER COOL... PR JUST A BIT LAZY?
The French Art Of Not Trying Too Hard
Ollivier Pourriol Profile £12.99
Aphotographer I know shoots masterpieces, from Meissen to Monet, for museum catalogues. He explained that the trick to handling these priceless works was to ignore their importance. His comment returned to me as I was reading Ollivier Pourriol’s The French Art Of Not Trying Too Hard, a book that extols the virtues of irreverence and light touches.
Pourriol is a philosopher of the popular kind, a particularly Gallic mixture of thinker and dreamer that affords him lecturing gigs at the Philharmonie de Paris. For the past 20 years he has been ‘exploring the art of living’, a circuitous journey that has led him to the conclusion that you succeed more when you renounce perfectionism and generally loosen up a little. He also maintains that the French do this better than anyone else.
‘I’m not saying that there’s no point making any effort at all, but rather that there are some goals that can only be reached indirectly,’ Pourriol states. He provides an impressive cast of French figures whose achievements support this roundabout route, from national treasures such as Gérard Depardieu and Zinedine Zidane to the tightrope walker Philippe Petit and the free- diver Jacques Mayol. What they share, Pourriol notes, is the facility to combine thought with action, while looking like they’re coasting.
Françoise Sagan, who wrote the bestselling novel Bonjour Tristesse when she was only 18, is another example. ‘It’s important to be lazy,’ Sagan remarked. ‘Books are made to a large extent out of wasted time, daydreaming, thinking about nothing.’ Pourriol suggests that a combination of relaxation and ambivalence creates a certain ‘French flair’.
Egalitarianism born of revolution has resulted in a nation of little emperors, he explains. ‘Perhaps the reason why the French are so ill-disciplined, capricious and prone to complaining is because in each of them exists a monarchic streak, concerned only with their own pleasure.’ That impulse generates an epic lack of self-doubt, which has considerable agency.
Pourriol considers the case of tennis ace
Yannick Noah. As dawn broke on a December morning in 1982, Noah drunkenly staggered out of a Toulouse nightclub, stripped down to his underpants and traipsed back to his hotel. A few hours later he won a final. ‘All the signs suggest that a sleepless night with lots of booze is the closest you can get to a state of grace,’ observes Pourriol.
And then there is love, for which the French have an almost alchemical genius for turning the distinctly casual into the seemingly romantic. Of course, one garçon’s joie de vivre is another man’s promiscuity, but Pourriol’s argument that falling in love should never be hard graft is a convincing one.
The author juggles his material with joyful abandon, adopting the kind of freestyle delivery that his book aims to unpick. And his clubbable prose is bolstered by Helen Stevenson’s artless translation, which seamlessly blends deep dives into the minds of Descartes and Rimbaud with jaunty diversions about stage fright and washing dishes. In this book we find the French tackling life – and its contemplation – as if it were a pastry: rich and light rather than stuff to be endlessly chewed over.
It was ever thus: while Francis Bacon was grappling with empiricism in Cambridge during the Renaissance, Montaigne was down in the Dordogne decorating his tower.
However, Pourriol falls short in his contention that the French have a monopoly on being breezy. Anyone who has taken a weekend stroll around the Marais knows that
Parisians really put the hours in in front of the mirror. Conversely, fluid and instinctive talents, from Eric Morecambe’s comedy to Nina Simone’s jazz, can be found in every country.
But this is a minor flaw in a thought-provoking and delightful book. Pourriol dismisses it as an airport read. Yet somehow, apparently without effort, he has turned it into so much more.