Surviving The Natives
Nov 5th, 2007 by Eats Wombats
The Sunday Times has an entertaining excerpt from a new book called Le Dossier: How to Survive the English, by Sarah Long.
I got as far as
Can you imagine a Parisian family abandoning their apartment to begin a new life in a cottage in Wales?
before laughing aloud and deciding I had to send this to a French MBA classmate. She has been in London for 20 years and likes it here better than France, but I think she will still find this jolie indeed. The English, to their credit, have always laughed at themselves at least as much as anyone else, and while there is often something particularly delicious about the cross-channel rivalry and mockery, this book continues that fine tradition: ostensibly, it is merely “translated” by Sarah Long, a friend of the French author Hortense de Monplaisir.
It’s an addition to a genre I want to explore more but which I refuse to call reverse anthropology. It includes two books on my someday list entitled Darkest England, by Idries Shah and Christopher Hope.
I managed to see only one of the programs in a recent series entitled Meet the Natives in which some tribesmen from the South Pacific visited the UK and made some pithy observations on a range of subjects. These were widely reported and were, in some cases quite profound, notwithstanding the natives being ready to laugh off the views of anthropologists who believe Prince Philip is a God.
