It is with great pleasure that I creep on other people’s Facebook walls.
To clarify: It is with great pleasure that I creep on other people’s “Favourite Book” category. I am shameless in my judgment of others based on their taste of books, and what better way to judge than through a ready made package of likes and dislikes? In the pre-Facebook era, you had to wait out those curiosity itches and make do with fleeting conversations on the “great books of our time” (a frustrating topic nonetheless), or else try to ring out the truth without sounding too desperate or dictatorial.
But with the advent of social media, and in specific, the culture of divulging all information previously relegated to the “private,” the world is now free to judge you based on your literary leanings. And oh, judge, we will.
The Little Prince? Cliche. Kerouac? Also cliche, but somehow the beats are excused. Guns, Germs, and Steels or some other pretentiously long international relations literature? The type we all love to hate. Dostoyevsky? You know abridged versions don’t count. Right?
Well anyway. Enough of snark talk. All that to say, I can be very obsessive when it comes to reading. Often, upon finishing a book that I enjoy, I feel the need to read all other books by the same author, and once this list has been checked off, I can’t help but go on to see what else the publishing house has to offer.
So it is with this logic, that I came to Gourmet Rhapsody by Muriel Barbery. I came to love love love her first book, The Elegance of a Hedgehog (well, her second, since Gourmet Rhapsody was her debut novel but was translated only recently). There is no point in trying to describe what the book is about as it will sound deathly boring. It involves a precocious twelve year old, a portress with a penchant for boulangerie wonders, and a Japanese tenant with a bidet. See, it sounds terrible.
A few months after, I saw a copy of Gourmet Rhapsody at a cook book shop in Kensington (the one that was featured in Vogue! but is also the one that never seems to be open!) and let out an audible gasp. Another book by Barbery? And it is about food you say? Fantastic.
I set out to read it one sick day, and finished it in one sitting. Farnam says that it doesn’t count as “one sitting” if you spent the entire day in bed, but I beg to differ. Part of the pleasure of the prose is easing into the rhythm of the writing, so I will not waste any words trying to describe to you how Barbery shapes her world of talking cats and resentful daughters and tagines of Tangier and butter on toast.
If you are rolling your eyes or still skeptical, here is an excerpt from the book, where the protagonist (who is a mean food critic the likes of Anton Ego from Ratatouille) describes the wonders of a single vegetable (or fruit – is tomato a vegetable or a fruit?):
…And yet I had always been acquainted with the tomato, since the time of Aunt Marthe’s garden, since the summer when an ever more ardent sun kissed the timid little growths, since the moment my teeth tore into the flesh to splatter my tongue with the rich, warm and bountiful juice, whose essential generosity is masked by the chill of a refrigerator, or the affront of vinegar, or the false nobility of oil. Sugar, water, fruit, pulp, liquid or solid? The raw tomato, devoured in the garden when freshly picked, is a horn of abundance of simple sensations, a radiating rush in one’s mouth that brings with it every pleasure. The resistance of the skin – slightly taut, just enough; the luscious yield of the tissues, their seed-filled liqueur oozing to the corners of one’s lips, and that one wipes away without any fear of staining one’s fingers; this pump little globe unleashing a flood of nature inside us: a tomato, an adventure.
How beautiful?
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