Very drôle

It’s nice to know that the trees lining the roads in Paris have microchips embedded in their trunks, that the city council is controlling the pigeon population by shaking the eggs to make them infertile and that the Café Voisin served elephant consommé during the 1870 siege.

It’s nice to know that the trees lining the roads in Paris have microchips embedded in their trunks, that the city council is controlling the pigeon population by shaking the eggs to make them infertile and that the Café Voisin served elephant consommé during the 1870 siege. But the pleasure of this learning comes at great personal cost.

Where an innuendo can be inserted, Stephen Clarke will insert it. If he were writing this review, he would have put ‘no pun intended’ after the word ‘insert’. Open any page at random and you will likely find two or three pairs of brackets. These are for the knowing asides, where the reader is supposed to roll his eyes in fond condescension and think about how very Parisian it all is.

The food section begins with a quotation from Émile Zola’s description of a market at daybreak: ‘The sun set the vegetables on fire … Now the swollen hearts of the lettuces were burning, the carrots began to bleed red, the turnips became incandescent.’ Next, Clarke explains what’s good about it: ‘No one, not even the poutiest celebrity chef, ever wrote about turnips like that. Here is a writer who wants to have sex with a vegetable. And in Paris that’s probably legal.’

This formula — a patronising modern reference, a gratuitous allusion to sex, a slightly offensive stereotype and a bit of emphatic punctuation to make it extra funny — is repeated on nearly every page.