Around the World in 80 Bites

While literature doesn't get much better than a long, super-descriptive food scene (the meals in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Farmer Boy! The restaurants in Hemingway's Movable Feast! The baked yam in Invisible Man!) it does get better when you are describing in minute detail meals had on epic journeys. There's been a spate of food memoirs lately, and even more recently than that a new crop of food memoirs On Location. There's something nostalgic and comforting reading about the food that people grow up with, and even if it's from a culture entirely foreign to you, what better way to understand cultures than in the food we grow up on. Some of the most beautiful sentences in literature seem to come from whatever gland is deep within us that hold the genuine love, passion and nostalgia for the foods that sustained us when we were young. Here's a roundup of my recent faves, and one I'm drooling to dig into:

Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking, Anya von Bremzen  This book was such a funtime treat to read. It was equal parts history of the Soviet Union, nostalgic memoir of a not-so-easygoing childhood, and a love poem to a century's worth of food from one of the biggest nations in the world, encompassing such a huge swath of culinary traditions it was dazzling, dizzying, and hunger-making. Von Bremzen is both funny and skilled, she made my stomach grumble embarrassingly over fish bones cooked in butter, something I'd never be interested in eating under normal circumstances. She is a sauce-y wordsmith!

My Berlin Kitchen, Luisa Weiss  On the other side of the Iron Curtain, Luisa Weiss grows up learning to cook and bake in her West German home. As a grown-up in America she returns to the recipes of her youth and tells a beautiful story that instantly transports you to the homey kitchens and worldly restraurants of megalopolis Berlin.

Blood, Bones and Butter, Gabrielle Hamilton  By now you might have noticed that the books in this post present a common color scheme. Red and yellow, the colors of the golden arches, have long been considered colors that will make consumers hungry and therefore to eat more. Perhaps this is true also of books, but when you've got a writer AND CHEF of such superlative skill as Gabrielle Hamilton, you cook drop her sentences in a greasy wax bag and the whole world would beg for more. Simultaneously a memoir, coming of age story, complicated love story, and hilarious if grueling account of the blood and sweat poured into opening her own restaurant, Hamilton's book is beautiful, true and offers one of the most fascinating accounts of understanding hunger in a brilliantly wrought scene that catches up with our narrator on her first trans-atlantic trip in Amsterdam. The simplicity of a small meal of a boiled potato and sliver of cheese has stuck with me YEARS after reading this book. She is SO BRILLIANT WHERE IS HER NEXT BOOK!?

A Fork in the Road, ed. James Oseland  Is a book I haven't even read yet but am salivating to dig into! It comes out in December and my-oh-my: Francine Prose, Andre Aciman, Rita Mae Brown, Marcus Samuelsson, Michael Pollan, Monique Truong, Madhur Jaffrey and a bajillion other writers dish on the best meals they've had abroad. Run don't walk--OH MY GOSH is it lunch time yet?!

Good Question

Trying to figure out something to say about this book, I scrolled through the customer reviews on Website-That-Will-Not-Be-Named, and I was surprised to find the biggest complaint people had about the memoir was it's disjointed, nebulous nature. A few people who gave the book only one or two stars said they enjoyed Didion's other work, but felt perhaps she was too close to the reality of this story to really tell it correctly and succinctly.

For those of you that don't know, Joan Didion's newest book, Blue Nights, is the disjointed, nebulous autobiographical narrative about her daughter, Quintana Roo, who died unexpectedly at the age of 39. The book is at once easy to read and extraordinarily difficult; for me, reading Didion's prose is not so much reading as it is listening to a cool voice speak inside my head. I see her thoughts so clearly, through whatever magic it is she wields; maybe we are just cosmic brethren, I'm not sure, but I am certainly stricken by it. However, it is this same cool voice that can also reach inside your heart and crush the dust out of it. In talking about the memories and death of her daughter (and husband, for that matter), one can visualize with crystalline detail her pain and confusion, her resolution in being the last remaining member of her family.

So what I would have to ask those people on WTWNBN, is, how else does one tell a story about that? What memories can you consult that will not lead you down a meandering path of recollection? I know it is an author's job to wrangle time and space into a consumable a form, but how can you when the nature of your despair is almost unnameable? Didion peppers her book with details; specific names of flowers, playmates, luxurious vacation spots and the layout of each house stayed in. These names and experiences jump around in time; Quintana is occasionally in her 20's, but it's not long before she is wearing a plaid school girl jumper and disappearing down a hill on her own. 

Memory is not stored in sequence. Could Didion have written this book any other way, and should she have? This book might not be about the shared experience of losing the person of Quintana Roo, but about Didion's experience of losing her daughter, and the process by which she continues to exist on earth without being crippled by woe. Didion discusses her own frailty, her owning aging as well, citing several doctors she visits and ailments she collects after she turns 75. This is also a story about her, about entropy. I suppose what my real question is, how do you detail a life, and then how do you detail the experience of mourning that life?

I don't know. It's a good question.

"the lost art of shutting up"

(Illustration by Timothy Goodman)

Did you read this article in the New York Times Book Review? The one about memoirs? I'll give you a minute. It's worth it. Critic and playwright Neil Genzlinger wrote a ballsy, sharp, and necessary critique on the state of a swollen genre: the memoir. My co-worker, preceptor, and friend Lisa forced me to read the article, and I almost cried laughing with relief.

As booksellers we see tons of books... you know...daily. There is no shortage of people writing memoirs. In fact, we thought about renaming the section "My childhood was worse than yours." It's not that we don't love well written, unique and quality prose, it's just that it would be nice if the quality of memoirs had to adhere to the same or similar standards as other genres. Consider this: If a poet writes a collection of confessional poems and pays no attention to craft ( it is sloppy, poorly edited and it's readability is dependent solely on the sexiness of the disclosure), it would get panned as self indulgent drivel.

As a student in an MFA program, I have lots of friends writing their memoirs, and as I would like to keep them friends...I will tread carefully here.

Not all humans experience the same suffering. Now, it is possible that all humans experience suffering the same, but the two are wildly different. I understand that if the worst trauma someone endures is a rejection letter from an Ivy, then that pain will register as high in their mind/ bodies' barometer as perhaps the disappointment of another individual who say, lost their children to starvation and curable childhood disease. Pain is relative. I get that. Human suffering is human suffering.

but...

when we sit down to write we have the obligation, and responsibility to the readers to make sure that what we have to say needs saying. ...("needs" is a very flexible word in this context.)

1.) Is what you are saying new?

2.) Is how you are saying it new?

3.) The above two qualifiers, substitute new with "better than TV"

Personally, I kinda love memoirs. I love a self indulgent voyeuristic jaunt into the hologram of another's domestic horror show. I just expect their suburban tragedy to be...well....tragic...or at least tragically well written.

So....Thanks you Neil Genzlinger for your wonderful review. I will now read "An Exclusive Love" because of your brilliant critique by comparison. More please.

Ok. Off my high horse.