Book Review: The Mistress of Spices

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices has been on my TBR list for some time, so when Jess over at Desperado Penguin and I were looking for our next foodie simul-blog, I suggested it. It seemed to have at least three elements I love in a novel: a strong, female protagonist, a focus on food and a clash of cultures. And I was right. Divakaruni has written a very modern novel steeped in magic realism with interesting, likeable characters and a real multi-cultural vibe. I should have loved it. But somehow, the balance was just a bit wrong for me, like a curry that has too much cumin and not enough ginger to smooth it out. It was good, it was punchy, but it wasn’t totally satisfying.

I think one problem might have been the balance of the story arc. We meet Tilo, our mystical Mistress of Spices, in Oakland, California, a seemingly ancient spice vendor with an Indian grocery in a rough part of town. Tilo’s first person narration dispatches two former “selves” – her childhood as a sorceress and her young adulthood as a pirate queen – in just a few unflattering pages. So when she arrives at the Island of Spices to begin her long apprenticeship to learn the magic arts of healing through spices and become an immortal mistress charged with helping the people of the subcontinent wherever they are in the world, I wasn’t convinced that the selfless, diligent life of a Spice Mistress represented her real destiny.

The other problem was the spices themselves. Who knew condiments could be such demanding characters? Divakaruni emphasizes their individual properties by naming each of her chapters after different spices. But rather than giving them unique personalities or voices within the book, they function together as a kind of harping Greek chorus. First they love Tilo. Then they’re angry at Tilo. They do her bidding. Then they don’t. But Tilo is still Tilo. At the end of the novel, Tilo is still a fabulously gifted but restless woman who doesn’t listen. She didn’t listen to her parents. She wasn’t content on the pirate ship. Why would we think she could follow the rules of a collection of seeds and leaves somewhere on the Pacific Coast?

Tilo how little you have understood. From the deep the voice is a hiss, like water on a hot iron. Or is it a sigh? Like the waterfall the avalanche the forest fire, we do not hate. We only do what we must. p. 304

What saved the book for me was the very quirky, forbidden love story that winds through the novel. Raven, Tilo’s “American,” is the only one who can see through her ancient body to the beautiful, immortal woman underneath. His story is one of the most interesting aspects of the novel. I loved Divakaruni’s musings on the expectations that people bring to multi-cultural relationships. And the story brought a great deal of tension to the end of the book, as I wondered whether or not Tilo could ever find a way out of the mess she’d made by interfering with the work of the spices.

Magic realism lovers and lovers of South Asian fiction will definitely find something to like in this title. It has a trippy, romantic feel that would probably be very appealing to chic lit readers – and indeed, my 16-year-old, chic lit-loving daughter adored this book. For me, it was a good but not great read. But it was a fun simul-blog, as it provoked some fun twitter chatter as we were reading. Why don’t you head over to the Desperado Penguin and her review?

This book also counts for two challenges, the South Asian Challenge and the Immigrant Stories Challenge. Thanks to Swapna and Colleen for hosting!

Sunday Salon: Penelopiad Read Along Invitation and Other Summer Fun

With yesterday’s graduation complete, Summer Reading Season officially starts today at Col Reads! I’m especially happy to be starting off this summer with two “buddy” reads. The first will be a foodie simul-blog with long-time friend Jess over at Desperado Penguin – we’ve both been reading Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices, and we’ll be blogging about it this week. I think this is the fourth simul-blog we’ve done, and I’m always surprised by our differing takes on the books we read, despite being friends for about 20 years.

Next up is a Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad. When we signed up for the Read-A-Myth Challenge way back in December, wonderful Bellezza at Dolce Bellezza noticed we both had the title on our lists, and suggested we might read it together. And we’d like to invite you to join us too! We’re planning on reading and posting any thoughts or questions during the week of May 23-May 28, with a wrap-up post on May 30. Atwood’s novella finally gives Penelope, the long-suffering wife of Odysseus, a chance to tell her own story. I’m looking forward to some good conversation about the “feminist” perspective on a classic tale. Please feel free to join us for any or all of the read – it’s totally informal, but we think it will be fun.

Aside from that, my summer plans include getting to work on the challenges I signed up for earlier in the year, which should make for a fascinating summer of reading. I’m behind on the GLBT, Book Blogger Abroad and Read-A-Myth challenges at this point, but the titles I have planned are very eclectic and diverse, and I’m excited to get back to them. My daughter and I will also be working on the What’s in a Name 4 Challenge together for her summer reading project, always a treat.

I’m also hoping to make plenty of time for something else I truly love this summer: photography. I’m hoping to master PhotoShop Elements, so look forward to lots more pictures – and maybe even a change in design of Col Reads. More on that later.

What do the next few months hold for you, reading and blogging-wise?

I hope to see some of your thoughts on The Penelopiad on May 30!

Book Review: Pig Perfect

I love micro-histories, and I love food. So when my buddy Jess over at Desperado Penguin suggested Peter Kaminsky’s Pig Perfect: Encounters with Remarkable Swine and Some Great Ways to Cook Them as the subject our next simul-blog, I quickly signed on. Pork is a critical ingredient in at least two cuisines I adore* – Spain’s and the American South’s – and I’ve always wondered why the ham in those places just seems to taste better than the stuff I get at home.

Kaminsky explains that little mystery, and many more, in his comprehensive ode to the Ossabaw**, a compendium of all things porcine.

Let’s start with a fair warning: there is no doubt that some animals are necessarily harmed in the making of luscious pork loin and succulent hams. If you are uncomfortable with eating meat at all, and I know many people that are, you should probably avoid this book, not because it is ugly or graphic in any way, but because you have already made decisions that will make the logic of this book less tenable for you. I admire that.

But I should also add a statement of responsibility: the reason that people like Mario Batali and Michael Pollan have enthusiastically recommended this book is because it supports a kind of meat eating that is both sustainable and rare – the kind of meat-eating most likely practiced by humans for millennia. Pig Perfect, at its heart, is a tribute to flexitarianism. It agrees with animal rights activists that the current methods of mass producing animals are heinous, cruel, and environmentally destructive – that humans are simply getting far less out of livestock, energy-wise, than we are putting in. In fact, the environmental disasters that accompany large-scale pig-farming are well documented by Kaminsky.

Instead, Kaminsky looks at the paleo-biological, historical and social roots of humans’ love of pork. He also devotes a fascinating chapter to the pork taboos found in Jewish and Islamic cultures. Ultimately, Kaminsky comes down on the side of moderation, arguing that pigs and humans actually evolved to live together, and makes a compelling argument that Europe’s “primordial” forests were actually products of the human/pig/acorn relationship.

Roaming forest and field is what pigs were born to do. Long-legged pigs are the natural form of this animal, able to move nimbly through woodlands eating acorns and grasses. That they should be raised this way is as self-evident to me as the fact that cattle should be raised on grasslands and not in feedlots on corn and soy. Grazing (as well as rooting, in the case of pigs) is the natural way for these domesticated animals to sustain themselves and us. p. 112

I really liked most of Kaminsky’s message. I can’t say the same for the recipes, which just didn’t look so appetizing to me. And having persuasively advocated for people to be thoughtful consumers of pork products, I really would have appreciated a section on Internet resources for jamón ibérico or Southern hams. Seriously, why create a demand for something, and not help satisfy it? The people who helped him from the book, and might benefit from interest in their products, were poorly served by that omission.

Also, as a strategic communications professor, I was totally put off by his chapter called “The PR Guys,” in which he seemed to be amazed that one of the best studies of the pork industry in the US was produced by a PR firm –to which he attributes negative intentions, without any evidence on his part, even though he finds no fault with the history. It was disappointing to read something so totally biased from someone who prides himself of being a “journalist.” He seemed to miss the fact that half of the people that spoke to him for this book from various companies and farms were probably PR professionals, or performed PR functions in the companies in which they worked – um, that’s why they spoke to him, to get their story out there. Kaminsky seems to subscribe to the notion that it’s “information” when he likes you, and “PR” when he doesn’t. Sorry, he lost credibility with me at that point.

But, in general, I’ll say I agree with his main thesis – and I’ll mention that Kaminsky is not saying anything that Pollan and Mark Bittman haven’t been saying for some time: namely, that we have to be more responsible about what we eat. If we only eat a little meat, we can assure that it is of high quality, and insist that it is treated humanely. I can certainly appreciate that.

Another foodie simul-blog with the Desperado Penguin. Next time we need a title that doesn’t make me so hungry, Jess!

As a non-fiction title, this counts for the Dewey Decimal Challenge. Thanks to Jen at The Introverted Reader for hosting!

*I do share a lot of vegetarian and vegan recipes, but I hope I’ve always made it clear that I do eat a small amount of meat and fish. In fact, since I don’t eat a lot of meat, I go out of my way to enjoy what I do eat, by making sure it’s of high quality (usually organic) and sustainable, which is why this book was so interesting to me.

**An American pig breed that is apparently related to the original pigs left by the Spanish conquistadors and early missionaries. And also apparently, as Alton Brown might say, good eats.

The unsatisfying nature of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

I start 2011 with a simul-blog on a food-related title, shared with my very dear friend (and incidentally, the maid-of-honor at my wedding), Jess of Desperado Penguin.

Aimee Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake represents an interesting strain of magic realism in current U.S. literature. It has a really cool premise. And some really interesting characters. Still, I have to admit that in the end it’s not a book I can easily recommend to others.

The totally cool premise is this: a girl finds out that she can “taste” the emotions of whoever has prepared her food. This presents a particular predicament in her case, as her mother is unhappy in her marriage – hence, the “sadness” associated with the lemon cake so devotedly prepared for her birthday celebration. Ironically, Rose tastes her mother’s hollowness and bitterness every day, in every lovingly prepared school lunch and every carefully crafted family dinner. She comes to love the mechanized, mass-merchandised foods that are never touched by human hands, as their inhumanity allows her a respite from the feelings that are thrust upon her by others. This is a weird and counter-intuitive message, to say the least.

I see this book as an indictment of both the “helicopter” parent and the uninvolved parent, although the uninvolved parent is by far the biggest loser in Bender’s calculus.

If I was quiet enough, he wouldn’t send me to bed. We colluded in this way: as long as I didn’t announce that I was a kid, he wouldn’t rise up as parent, and for an hour, we could both have a little respite from our roles.

Rose’s helicopter mom counts on her brilliant older son to guide her through life. Her absentee father never bothers to share with his children the one piece of information that might have helped them make sense of their lives. But Bender never gives us an example of a “good” parent, so I’m not sure what she would change about either of the parents she portrays so unsympathetically in this book.

One of the unique aspects of this book is the relationship between Rose Edelstein and her older brother, Joseph. Rose, as might be expected, adores her older brother. But in the end the reader is left wondering how her selfish brother could possibly deserve her adoration. Only Joseph’s best friend, George, seems to care about each of the members of the family as an individual, but in the end he realizes he cannot make them be “normal,” no matter how much he cares for them. They are who they are – but George’s withdrawal leaves the family without an anchor in the normal world.

I have spent some time thinking about this book, and I have to admit I don’t understand what Bender wants me to take away from it. The ending is so unsatisfying that I felt agitated when I finished: “THAT’S where this was going?” was my final thought. It’s not a bad book, but not a good read either. The lack of quotation marks was annoying to me, a mark of laziness, not creativity, from my perspective. I think magic realism devotees will be interested in this highly Americanized iteration of the genre. But aside from that, it’s not my cup of tea – or my piece of cake. I can honestly admit that if I wasn’t simul-blogging this book with buddy Jess, I would have shelved it.

The Cookbook Collector: A Character Connection

Yes, Allegra Goodman’s The Cookbook Collector tells the absorbing story of two motherless, archetypically opposite sisters finding their way through the Dot.Com Boom in 1990s Berkeley, California. But as much as I liked the book, and I really did, neither of them is the subject of my Character Connection. Because with The Cookbook Collector, Goodman has written one of the absolute sexiest characters I have encountered in a book for quite a while: George Friedman, owner and operator of Yorick’s Used and Rare Books, where the younger and flightier of the beautiful Bach sisters works.

George Friedman has it all. A 40-something Microsoft millionaire, he sold his shares at their peak, and his money now funds a relentless search for authenticity. He doesn’t just want the best of everything – with lots of money that would be easy. What he’s looking for is the rare, the extraordinary, the unique, from Grgich Hill wines to his perfectly restored Maybeck house. He’s honorable. He’s nouveau-patrician. He’s handsome. He’s smart. And he’s a book lover. Are you swooning already?

“He was a reader, an autodidact with such a love for Great Books that he scarcely passed anymore for a Berkeley liberal. Strange to say, but at this time in his life George would have a happier conversation with Berkeley, the philosopher, than with most of his old Berkeley friends.”

Now anyone who has ever read an Austen novel knows that an unmarried, handsome, wealthy man, especially one who comes off as just a bit too self-sufficient, must be “in want of a wife.” And there’s also no doubt that George owes a great deal to Austen’s own legendarily wealthy, difficult but ultimately noble heroes, particularly my best crush forever, Mr. Darcy. So I don’t think it’s giving too much away to say that I anticipated the potential outcome of George’s storyline within the first page of his appearance, cranky and authoritarian – but still quite endearing – shouting out orders to Jessamine. Still, the novel has some major twists, so it didn’t seem at all contrived or predictable.

But what I really like is how Goodman has reimagined the Darcy-model for the beginning of the 21st century. George is a fabulous cook, a runner and definitely not a smotherer. He is selfish, certainly. How can anyone who bases his life on acquiring the nextest, bestest, shiniest thing fail to be a selfish? But it’s clear from the beginning that what George really needs someone to share his collections with. In fact, if he had someone to share them with – if he could actually find the one, truly unique thing in the world, someone to love him completely – he wouldn’t need the collections at all. And I really couldn’t help rooting for him to find that person throughout this really enjoyable book, because he struck me as the most decent character in it.

I’m really glad George Friedman was my first Character Connection – it was kind of like a good first date, if my husband will forgive the analogy. I have never participated in a meme before, but I have read a few of these and truly enjoyed them. Writing this has definitely given me a different perspective on my book reviews, and I’m sure I’ll participate again. So thanks to the Introverted Reader for hosting Character Connections, and thanks to my awesome buddy Jess at Desperado Penguin who suggested we read this book together and “simul-blog.”

Move over, Mr. Darcy. There’s a new literary crush on the block. And he’s even awesome in the kitchen. I’m in literary love.