The Bonjour Effect

The Secret Codes of French Conversation Revealed

By: Julie Barlow, Jean-Benoit Nadeau

Narrated by: Teri Schnaubelt

Length: 8 hrs and 37 mins

Publisher's summary

Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow spent a decade traveling back and forth to Paris as well as living there. Yet one important lesson never seemed to sink in: how to communicate comfortably with the French, even when you speak their language. In The Bonjour Effect, Jean-Benoît and Julie chronicle the lessons they learned after they returned to France to live, for a year, with their twin daughters. They offer up all the lessons they learned and explain, in a book as fizzy as a bottle of the finest French champagne, the most important aspect of all: the French don't communicate; they converse.

To understand and speak French well, one must understand that French conversation runs on a set of rules that go to the heart of French culture. Why do the French like talking about "the decline of France"? Why does broaching a subject like money end all discussion? Why do the French become so aroused debating the merits and qualities of their own language?

Through encounters with school principals, city hall civil servants, gas company employees, old friends, and business acquaintances, Julie and Jean-Benoît explain why, culturally and historically, conversation with the French is not about communicating or being nice. It's about being interesting.

©2016 Julie Barlow and Jean-Benoît Nadeau (P)2017 Tantor

Critic reviews

"The authors clearly had a ball researching the book, and their glee is infectious. The writing is as light as it is substantive, and if that sounds like a contradiction, I would refer you to a soufflé." ( The New York Times)

Great book, and hello from Paris

This book is quite good and should be updated as it was published in 2017. Would like to hear further updates as things have changed even further since this book was written.

Great and informative

An enjoyable must read any non-French who has ties with France. Balanced and engaging storytelling on the French culture. It will make one's future interactions with the French more interesting.

Worth a Listen for Francophiles

Having an intermediate command of the French language and always having found French culture and history seductive and captivating, this was absolutely my kind of book. It accomplished its purpose by illuminating differences as to how the French do things and perceive the world, with the unique historical and sociological factors at play.

While I understand that Teri Schnaubelt seems to be a big audio-book star, it is beyond comprehension that an author with no command of the French language would have been used for a title like this. Someone else deserved to have performed this. As an example of just how clueless the narrator is, "Le Pen" is pronounced with the nasalized vowel, which indicates a complete and total disconnection between Schnaubelt and anything about French society. She is clearly using a pronunciation guide to help her, but her ineptitude and the lack of editing slip out again with "jacobinisme" pronounced "jay-cohb-in-izmuh"; at times she is using her pronunciation guide, and at times she is winging it.

With a title with such a heavy emphasis on foreign language, it really detracts from the experience and enjoyability wincing and cringing every thirty seconds.

Regarding the content of the book, in spite of its many poignant observations about the French and its utility to any traveler and foreigner, it also grows redundant in the second half and contains a lot of the standard left-wing blather. As an example, in a section on the French Revolution, the leftists are described as supporting individual rights whereas the rightists were all counter-revolutionaries and royalists which is eminently untrue. There were many moderate revolutionaries on the right, and the leftists were the biggest mass murders and lovers of the guillotine under Robespierre, so this portrayal makes perfect since if one considers not life an individual right. Furthermore, the "extreme right" in France is portrayed as this terrible, malodorous societal disease while nothing bad is said of the extreme left.

Enfin, although the first half earns a solid five-out-of-five for content, the second half starts to grow dull. The performance of the narrator is pure cringe and a non-French-speaking person should have never been considered for this position. Also, the book does not get political often but when it does, it is the same pseudo-intellectual babble one would hear in a coffee shop from any struggling liberal arts/psychology major with an Apple laptop. This book is easy to recommend for someone with an interest in French culture but it will not change anyone's life.

Extremely useful

Extremely useful for anyone visiting France. Very helpful for contrasting social conversations that differ between Europe and N America.

good content, annoying performance

bonjour! as an american in paris, i loved the insights into the french psyche. i’d recommend this as a traditional book, but not as an audiobook. i found the narrator’s tone and delivery overly stuffy. and her french pronunciation was frequently off. c’est dommage as there were so many interesting topics discussed.

Very interesting and informative book

This is a very interesting and informative book. It increases my awareness that all cultures, including my own, have arbitrary and often unspoken rules that dictate how people behave. These arbitrary rules of any given culture probably generate prejudices against cultures whose own arbitrary rules are different than theirs. The narrator did an excellent job when you consider her lack of French fluency. However, I would have rather that a more fluent French speaker had been chosen to narrate.

Narration - Such an affected voice

The Narrator has an odd way of flattening out words and leaving them at the back of her throat. Its SO incredibly odd. I really like all the information in this book, but i have to stop and get a different book every few chapters to cleanse my ears before I can go back to it. Such a shame.

Interesting and Peculiar Insight Into France

Coming from someone that has never had the opportunity to go to France, this book notes very specific behaviors and actions that the French have and expect among their peers. I was very surprised at the level of detail that the book goes into presenting French life and culture, almost as if I were sitting in dinner table with the authors discussing their daily life in France. It enabled me to draw parallels and comparisons with American culture, and ultimately presented what I would assume France would be to a foreigner seeking to live in France for a long duration.

If you are curious about particular habits of the French and the reason for their behavior, then this book is quite a good pick. The only problem that I had with this book is that the structure and flow felt a bit odd. While the stories are not hard to follow, it's very loose in it's connections outside of the overarching theme of France. I can't say that I blame the authors for taking this approach; it's quite difficult to create an overall flow with a series of short stories only related in that they discuss behavior and practices. Yet still, there is definitely an oddity in how the story jumps from a bus ride into a discussion at the dinner table to a swimming pool. They are all great stories on their own, of course, with intriguing lessons, yet the book lacked a certain flow to it.

Nevertheless, I highly recommend this book if you see yourself staying in France for an extended duration of time. It has particular insights on French culture and quirks that are rarely found in more popular and easier to access sources. If you're staying for only a few days in France, this book would most likely help, but I cannot comment on the degree that the entirety of this book will aid you.

Interesting but a bit unfocused at times

I have lived in France for nearly 6 years between the ages of 32 and 38 while raising two children. I grew up in America. I think the authors did a good job of communicating many interesting and not necessarily well known aspects of French society, yet some of the anecdotes seemed a bit peripheral to me.

On another note, I didn’t agree with a number of the analyses in the book, and would say that about 2/3 of what the authors said resonates with our experience in France so far. There was a fair amount of quoting one or two academic studies as authorities on a certain aspect of French society or culture, when I thought there were other better explanations of the phenomena described.

I will recommend this book to people before or during a stay in France… but to be taken with a grain of salt realizing that the reader may come to different conclusions about the way French people act.

It’s full of personal anecdotes and stories. There’s also a certain amount of explanation of politics and society. FYI It is written with certain chapters by him and certain chapters by her.

Thinking about these issues, using the stories the authors describe, will be very useful as outsiders attempt to interact successfully with French people.

Final note- I wasn’t crazy about the narration, in part because, although she had a sort of French-sounding accent, she grossly mis-pronounced a number of French words. It’s no big deal but for most, but for readers who speak French, it gave an air of false authenticity to the book which is no fault of the authors. And if you don’t speak French, you may find the large number of French words and expressions difficult to mentally re-transcribe as pronounced.

Worth reading, yet I wonder if there isn’t a better intro to French culture book out there.

Smart, entertaining, excellent command of French language

Teri Schnaubelt's narration is engaging & intelligent--she speaks the French phrases beautifully: a big plus!