Another Long Day on the Piste: A Season in the French Alps

by Will Randall

Will Randall has gone to live in a village in the French Alps in order to write and ski. His adventures both on the slopes and in the strange, romantic community are here beautifully and wittily documented.

Genres: Travel, France, Nonfiction

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

English travel writer.

Educated in London, he taught languages in the English west country for ten years, including 5 years at Blundell's School, before moving to live in the South Pacific islands. He is best known for his book Solomon Time.

His 2003 book Indian Summer is about time he spent teaching in a school for orphans in Poona, India. While in India he also spent some time in the Indian film industry; he had a small role in The Legend of Bhagat Singh and a larger role in An Ideal Wedding.

Reviews

[Ape]

I've not had any interest in ski-ing and never been ski-ing. Honestly I have a very ambivilent attitude to snow, even after having lived in Sweden for three years. And having read this book I have zero interest in ever going ski-ing. Seems like a bit of a pointless book for me to read. Well, I'd read Will Randall's other three travel books and enjoyed them, and as I got this via a swap, I thought I would give it a go. Not just because of my disinterest in ski-ing, it is the weakest of his books. If you're going to read his books, leave this until last. His writing is kind of genteel humour and light magazine travel writing. In his other books there were projects, jobs and things going on. In this he goes to the French Alps, does a bit of ski-ing, gets a job as an English tutor but doesn't really write about it, does a week as a chalet girl and... meh. Not a lot to it.

It all starts when he returns to the UK having completed many travels (the previous books) and is persuaded by ex pupils (he taught at a UK school once) to come out with them to France for the ski season. And because he's a bit lost as to what to do with his life now, he goes. And bimbles about. The young men, in their twenties I guess, are "cool", "rad dude" blah blah... ski heads. The whole posing and obsession with labels and money doesn't appeal. It's not impressive to read about how the people who go to work in these chalets, and the sheer arrogance of the rich skiers who come for their holidays. There's a Russian oligarch who comes to the little village where they're all staying and the money he throws around is just revolting. And then he decides he wants to buy up the village.

Usually with travel books and books about countries, they make me want to go there - the exception being war torn nations, for obvious reasons. Oddly enough, this peaceful tale of ski-ing has left me with the same feeling.

[Heidi Seary]

This was a first book group book of the year and although it was not long I struggled to want to read it. So what were the issues? It did not date well ( published in 2006) and was filled with sexist comments and out of date cultural references to people. The author did not seem to like skiing very much and did very little of it. My main problem was that he acted like a teenager although he was in is mid 30’s and he cared far too much what other people thought of him all the time. I think he tried far too hard to be funny and I did not enjoy his humour.

[Kevin]

Thought this book was quite poor. Another reviewer mentioned that after reading a travel book you quite often want to visit and see the area for yourself but with this book it's not the case. Although the author frequently tries to be self depreciating I found him to come across as a bit smug and annoying and not really that funny. Maybe someone who likes skiing would appreciate this book more than I did.

[Derbhile Graham]

This was a bit boring, despite the glamorous location, and there were lots of clunky sentences. I read on largely because of my love of skiing, but eventually skipped to the end, where there was a nice little summary of what ultimately happened to the characters.