If there were an activity I love more than reading, it would be eating. And if there is any activity that combines the both together so very well, it’ll be reading about food. Lucky for me, so many people have ventured into writing about food: from the preparation of it, to the stories behind it, from the cooking of it and right down to the eating of it.
Before I talk about Jay Rayner’s “ The Man Who Ate the World”, let me first state that food writing is an art, and it is an art that not many people do well. So what if you are JK Rowling? You can’t depend on an excellent word bank or good amount of imagination to write about food. It takes a skilled writer with plenty of guts to write about food in the most glorified detail without sounding like Nigella Lawson. You can’t be so explicit that your reader gets too hungry to go on reading, and you also can’t be too cursory that your writing becomes something you find in the lifestyle and cooking section of the newspaper.
Which is why I quite enjoyed Rayner’s book. I gravitated to the book when I saw it in a book sale because from the cover I figured it would make me laugh. It did, at the preface, when he warned me to read this in a café with no obstructing glassware and snacks within reach. As a food critic, you would think he might be pretty adept about all things food, but then he gets himself in strange places (Sushi in Moscow?), eating even stranger food (lamb cooked in sour milk?) and meeting the strangest people (descendents of Stalin’s chefs?). I liked that he didn’t make me that hungry – I wanted to relish the next story as much as I wanted to savour the garlicky escargot and the foie gras terrine buried beneath a leaf-fall of summer truffle shavings.
Jay Rayner set out on a quest to see if those fabled Michelin-starred restaurants are really something to shout out about. And he tells us what we already know, and that is the perfect meal can’t be found anywhere with Baroque fittings or a €200 degustation menu. It just can’t be found.
It takes a really gifted writer with the precise recipe of unabashed honesty, wicked intellectuality and sly wit to make an autobiographical memoir truly readable. De Assis (1839-1908, Brazilian) achieved this feat in 160 intentional chapters, each illuminating luminously the trials and tribulations of his (alter) ego. Reflecting an astute style-choice (he opts for the posthumous route from the get-go since the dead could always only have fun!), these disparate tracks re-create the digressive nature of consciousness-in-being by skipping lithely between life’s predominant polarities both across and within chapters: objectivism and subjectivism (or depiction and conversation; reflection and refraction, reality and philosophy). The result is an intimate reading experience facilitated through an embracive literary structure. There are many addictive and attractive things about ‘Epitaph’, the greatest of which would be the reader’s desire to eventually obtain a fragment of Assis’ bravery in his ability to reminisce a life’s worth in glee. I affirm that this is quite possibly one of the ‘greatest novels you never heard of’.
The Holocaust, arguably a historical individual, has always been fascinating because of its extraordinary components. It is a bizarre circumstance where incomprehensible evil is dealt a worthy opponent in the incarnation of unwavering will and mercy. Depictions of this battle swarmed with documentarian value are abundant; what are few and far between are the ones which could deliver an ease of literary accessibility during reading, while keeping the horror at arm’s length. Yes, I am talking about non-fiction literature. Impact-wise, Capote’s In Cold Blood comes close to what I consider to be Primo Levi’s opus, The Drowned and The Saved. (How about Elie Wiesel’s Night?) Levi, an Auswitch survivor, writes with such fluidity that you would think that the blood which once flowed never stopped. Yet somehow, you could feel that it had, because of his willingness to understand analytically the conditions (psychological, structural) of the rested dead and the walking ones. Through Levi’s writing style, one is able to get a sense of his personal struggle for mnemonic reconciliation: it is not about getting closer to the heart of suffering; rather, it is to manufacture and then maintain a delicate distance with that emotional core, through a beautiful mind.
The Hours is one of the subtlest novels you will ever pick up, yet also one of the most powerful and haunting. Nothing seems to really be happening, yet so much has already happened because everything interior is alive and well. Just as there is not much to be said about the impending grief of losing a dear friend to AIDS, why not realize the breeze and its whispers while fetching him flowers in an early spring morning full of possibility? Such is life.
Therefore, instead of fashioning characters that hover above their banality, Michael Cunningham wisely chooses to locate personal stories amidst their everyday condition. Characters and their pasts meander in and out of their structured circumstances, showing their faces like hallowed ghosts. The choices that are revealed under such setting render the characters’ humanity, in all its shades, starker, and it is a very beautiful thing to witness. Standing tall on the shoulders of Virginia Woolf’s vision in Mrs Dalloway, The Hours is perched as a fitting postmodern companion. The durable scaffold of the former is revived as a recurrent situational text for reality referencing in the latter. However, what is borrowed are never the mere details and manners of one era (early 20th century England), but the common emotional undercurrents that echo through time, such that the years that divide them erode away, only to exist as convenient chapters of one same book. Cunningham knows this, and here, his interpretation allows a re-reading of Woolf, updating her text with an urgent contemporary relevance. This is a great personal homage that is tastefully done. The visionary is dead, long live the visionary. Unlike in Specimen Days (c.f. Walt Whitman was his muse) where this strategy was employed to a slightly contrived and inconsistent effect, the result here is an intricately-woven cross-stitch of life’s tapestry that is ‘equally poised between despair and the desire to live’ (Meryl Streep, 2002).
“J.D. Salinger who was thought at one time to be the most important American writer to emerge since World War II but who then turned his back on success and adulation, becoming the Garbo of letters, famous for not wanting to be famous, died on Wednesday at his home in Cornish, N.H., where he had lived in seclusion for more than 50 years. He was 91.”
To read the full article from the NYT, click here.
Go on, pepper your life with a healthy dose of storytelling sessions and workshops by MoonShadow Stories, a homegrown creation by Kamini and Verena (above). Check out their early-2010 schedule here. The Timeless Tales session looks especially inviting!
Slammers take note: there is a poetry slam event next Sunday, with attractive prizes to be won. If you are seeking adrenaline over the weekend, why not put on your performative suit and jump straight into the fray? There is also a free workshop on poetry slamming this coming Saturday, 23 Jan. More details here.
The extent to which authors and their genres influence the way the rest of us make and make of happenings. Indulge in this “mystery all insoluble” here.
Somehow, while I do appreciate what the advent of the EBM and its ilk can possibly do for independent bookstores and their network of lesser-known authors/communities contributing to subaltern literature or theory through the means of self-publishing, I wonder if this utopian position placed upon the EBM as a vessel for democratizing views/voices is slightly misjudged, and hence, overrated. If one’s main desire is to achieve solely the act of publishing, then by all means, carry on. Yet, even this desire will dilute. Like for currency, I am more concerned with the issue of circulation. Books need to be symbolically produced for them to be significantly read or received. As such, both the publisher and its size matter because they reflect the scale and location which the content to be reproduced is at, and ready to be consumed by, beyond a particular niche. Otherwise, they will be no better than banana notes. Don’t get me wrong, the EBM is a valuable weaponry in this fight against censorship, but it will remain a parallel war if the tool/technology is seen as the solution.
If poetry and/or music turns you on, why not have them both at 2 of Esplanade’s concourse events this weekend? In case you need any more jostling: they are ab-free! Featured performing artistes include the Mango Dollies, and Breakbeat Theory.
