This collection of very fine vignettes by Louis-Bernard Robitaille, Paris correspondent for the Montreal newspaper La Presse, captures much of what makes contemporary France so fascinating and so maddening. After 30 years of living in France, Robitaille is long past the first blush of infatuation with the nation’s surface charms. His writing carries an expert observer’s appreciation of France’s formidable complexities. These complexities, he argues, are the result of a rich history.

Thus, Robitaille writes in one of the book’s few cruel passages, “The French are only complicated, like a giant puzzle for which you don’t have all the pieces; they are never surprising, as they might be were they ever to transcend those forces that make them what they are.” The lovely surprises in his own book contradict this assertion.

Robitaille is most fascinated by France’s Byzantine social codes (“There are 63 ways to end a letter, of which some are reserved for correspondence between women”). But few subjects seem beyond his grasp; he writes thoughtfully about food, money, politics, music, sports, and sex. He interviews such personalities as Louis Malle and Isabelle Adjani, figures to whom few Canadian journalists have such ready access.

As a francophone Quebecker, Robitaille faces fewer obstacles than do anglophone journalists in decoding French society. But he never loses the ironic detachment of the outsider, the observer. Indeed, if there remain English Canadian readers who think Quebeckers and the French are essentially interchangeable, Robitaille’s book will help disabuse them of that fallacy. He has a remarkably sharp eye for the telling detail, and his lucid prose is expertly translated by Don Winkler, a previous winner of the Governor General’s translation award. Here’s Robitaille describing his first glimpse of the film composer Michel Legrand in a Paris jazz club: “On a handkerchief-sized stage, he is at the piano, backed by three musicians. Glasses still on the end of his nose, Adidas, sleeves rolled up, tie undone. The same air of concentration – or absence.” Readers could hardly hope for a more congenial, well-connected host as they explore the intricacies of this most intricate society.