Deep France: A Writer’s Year in the Bearn, published by Pan in May 2004, £7.99  

What’s it about?

In 2002, Celia took a grown-up gap year and went to live in the village of Orriule in the French province of Bearn. Deep France is a month-by-month account of her experiences, the friends she made, the places she visited and the food she cooked, with recipes both regional and modern at the end of each section.

The Bearn, in the extreme south-west of France, was home to the Three Musketeers and to Edmond Rostand, the creator of Cyrano de Bergerac. It enjoys one of the most robust regional cultures in France, with its own language, a great musical tradition and a history peopled with romantic figures – chief among them King Henry IV.

Test taste:

Soon my mind started flailing for the simplest English expressions. The whole machinery of language, which normally turned over so smoothly and constantly, processing my thoughts and making them into words with effortless facility, had suddenly turned rusty and was clanking to a standstill.

My respect for bi-lingual writers rocketed. Now I appreciated the immense achievement of authors such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Isabel Allende, Salman Rushdie or Anita Desai, who could create supple and evocative prose while all the time, in their heads, two entirely different systems of thought were struggling for supremacy.

The effort of moving between two tongues all the time was utterly exhausting.

A sustained conversation in French took as much physical effort as a 10 kilometre run.

 

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