Explanation of The Novel's Title
The title of the book refers, in a metaphorical way, to all the difficult situations Paul West finds himself in during his stay in France, but also, literally, to the huge amount of dog excrement that can be found in the streets of Paris in this fiction. "A Year in the Merde" is also an allusion to A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle, an earlier work on Anglo-French cultural relations. In the same way, the title Merde Actually is a further allusion to the film Love Actually (2003) starring Hugh Grant. In both cases there is a vein of light comedy exploited by director and author respectively. There is the additional coincidence that Love Actually came out in the year in which Stephen Clarke was writing A Year in the Merde and its sequel Merde Actually, and relating it to the war in Iraq which was staged at that time - to the detriment of Franco- US relations.
Read more about this topic: A Year In The Merde
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