A French teacher settles in Finland in the late 1980s and writes letters to a friend back home. This bilingual book offers mostly dinner anecdotes and mundane banter with a twist of snobbery (this would probably be a collection of social media posts nowadays). The superficial analysis of mores seems to have lost its value (most of it doesn't seem as if it would still apply), but the linguistic commentary raised interesting things.

• The brutality of a metro sign indicating the place is for commuters only: "Asiaton oleskelu kiellety" litterally : "Being (here) without object/purpose is forbidden". He suspects this is a Finnish existential motto (I'm inclined to agree).

• The troubling Finnish politeness (which is frankness), when his students refuse to invent an appropriate excuse to explain why they didn't do their homework. He then tries to teach them the merits of a white lie.

• The counterintuitive poetry of Finnish: the grating "rakastan sinua" (I love you) and the charming "inhoan sinua" (I loathe you)

But it's not a collection of SoMe posts. In the midst of his habit (a letter a week), some unexpected things appear, poetry, for instance, when the narrator tells about sharing a table with an unnamed woman at a café, and as she leaves, he suddenly drinks the last drop of her coffee to retain something from this apparition.