On the appointed day, after coming out of the metro, I stopped at the brasserie to avoid being early.
The opening line gives a strong indication of the style of writing to come. This is not dense Faulknerian narration The sentences are short and terse and often comprise the entirety of the paragraph. Stretched out over the course of a novel, this writing takes up more than 250 pages, but in reality the word count we’re talking about here is more equivalent to a novella. Or, considering the book was adapted into an award-winning film, perhaps the more appropriate comparison is to a screenplay treatment. The point is that those looking for a quick read for some reason—something to get through on a long flight or to write about for a term paper—would do well to consider this book.
“M’sieur I didn’t understand what you said.”
“But it’s simple: there’s a class trip.”
“But you said some other thing I didn’t understand.”
“All I said was there would be a museum trip.”
“But you said like, He won’t say, or something.”
“It goes without saying?”
“That’s it.”
What leads to this little exchange is the teacher (narrator) merely informing the class that a field trip to the museum is planned and that, as such, it goes without saying they will need permission slips signed by parents. It is the sort of thing that is said in millions of classrooms every day without such an exchange needing to take place, but in this case the very fact that the student does not quite understand what is a very familiar expression points very significantly to the problem of education in a classroom where cultural differences exist between instructor and student. The lesson to be taken here is that if a communications breakdown can be stimulated by something as relatively trivial as a very commonly used idiomatic expression, just imagine the difficulties students face with significant issues, especially if compounded through being taught by an impatient or xenophobic teacher
“M'sieur, I wanted to ask you, what's a semicolon ?"
Coffee with no sugar, strong enough to set the tastebuds screaming.
"Look you know very well what a semi-colon is. It's a dot over a comma."
“I'm asking how you use it. You're so stupid sometimes, m'sieur."
No sugar, very hot.
"I've already explained how you use it."
"Yes, but I didn't understand."
Really steaming.
This is a snippet of a short conversation between a student and the teacher, but with the addition of the lines not framed by quotation marks, it really becomes a three-way discourse. The student is trying to engage her teacher and the teacher is shrugging her off. It would seem incredibly rude without the narrative commentary within the dialogue. With that commentary, it becomes something worse than rude. It becomes an insight into the basic and fundamental problem with educational systems of any so far devised. These are systems for imparting information that is utterly reliant upon the fragility of emotional relationships. A simple bit of factual knowledge like how to use a semicolon could easily be taught by a robot and if that were all education demanded, they would probably already be wide in place. Robots are far less useful for imparting nuance, perception, theory, and interpretation, however, so replacing human educators with machines is not the answer. Maybe the answer is simpler: put a coffeemaker in every classroom.
