Good Books

 

I enjoyed reading the novel Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine. It was a top bestseller in 2018 when it was published. Along with several other books, it’s been on my list for a long time. I thought that the author, Gail Honeyman, did a good job of building a character who had been very damaged as a child by neglect and uncaring authorities who were responsible for her welfare. The first-person narrative works very effectively at portraying a person who doesn’t have a good grip on what really happened, but who learns to be more and more honest in attempting to attain insights — one might almost say enlightenment — about her experiences. 

The word FINE is used throughout the book as a kind of touchstone about Eleanor’s experiences. She always says she is fine. A search discloses use of the word over 80 times in the text. At the end, she points out that saying she is fine was always the only way she was allowed to describe her condition. And thus she was never allowed to develop any insight into what was being done to her or how she authentically felt. My summary sounds trite, but her way of using the word “fine” is much more nuanced.

Near the end of the book, she finally grasps the significance of her childhood and also her adult isolation:

“I woke again. I had not closed the curtains and light was coming in, moonlight. The word connotes romance. I took one of my hands in the other, tried to imagine what it would feel like if it was another person's hand holding mine. There have been times when I felt that I might die of loneliness. People sometimes say they might die of boredom, that they're dying for a cup of tea, but for me, dying of loneliness is not hyperbole. When I feel like that, my head drops and my shoulders slump and I ache, I physically ache, for human contact—I truly feel that I might tumble to the ground and pass away if someone doesn't hold me, touch me. I don't mean a lover — his recent madness aside, I had long since given up on any notion that another person might love me that way — but simply as a human being. The scalp massage at the hair-dressers, the flu jab I had last winter— the only time I experience touch is from people whom I am paying, and they are almost always wearing disposable gloves at the time. I'm merely stating the facts.

“People don't like these facts, but I can't help that. If someone asks you how you are, you are meant to say FINE. You are not meant to say that you cried yourself to sleep last night because you hadn't spoken to another person for two consecutive days. FINE is what you say.” (p. 393)

I also loved the book Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt, which was also a bestseller. after its publication in 2022. The center of this book is an octopus named Marcellus, who lives in a display tank in an aquarium. Marcellus narrates some of the chapters of the book, and he has an incredible grasp of what he has seen, with uncanny insights into the people who maintain and visit the aquarium. However, the author doesn’t overdo the insightful narrative of this remarkable invertebrate creature — most of the book is narrated from a conventional omniscient point of view.

Here are a few of the words of wisdom from Marcellus:

“IF THERE IS ONE TOPIC OF CONVERSATION HUMANS never exhaust, it is the status of their outdoor environment. And for as much as they discuss it, their incredulity is ... well, incredible. That preposterous phrase: Can you believe this weather we're having?

“How many times have I heard it? One thousand, nine hundred and ten, to be exact. One and a half times a day, on average. Tell me again about the intelligence of humans. They cannot even manage to comprehend predictable meteorological events.

“Imagine if I were to stride over to my neighbors, the sea jellies, and, while shaking my mantle with disbelief, make a comment such as: Can you believe these bubbles these tanks are putting out today?

Preposterous.

“(Of course, this would also be preposterous because the jellies would not answer. They cannot communicate on that level. And they cannot be taught. Believe me, I have tried.)”  (p. 149)

More of the wisdom of Marcellus:

“I have observed humans at every life stage, and they are, at all times, undeniably human. Even though the human baby is helpless and must be carried by its parent, no one could mistake it for anything else. Humans grow from small to large and then sometimes recede again as they approach the end of their life span, but they always have four limbs, twenty digits, two eyes on the front of their heads.

“Their dependence upon their parents is unusually prolonged. Certainly it makes sense that the smallest children require assistance with the most basic of tasks: eating, drinking, urinating, defecating. Their short stature and clumsy limbs make these activities difficult. But as they gain physical independence, oddly, their struggle continues. They summon mother or father at the slightest need: an untied shoelace, a sealed juice box, a minor conflict with another child.

Young humans would fail abysmally in the sea.“ (p. 117)

I enjoyed Remarkably Bright Creatures, both for the wonderful creation of Marcellus, the sentient octopus, and for the human story that’s partly observed by Marcellus.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I was in the middle of reading Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke, and I have finished reading it. The suspense and the tightly-wound plot all are sustained until the end. This author is really adept at creating complicated characters!

Here’s an example that shows the author’s portrayal of a character — and also shows the way Locke uses food scenes:

“By the time he pulled into the parking lot at Geneva's, the sun was setting. Randie left the truck first, lifting the bottle of bourbon from the backseat and walking it into the cafe.

“She chased it with sips of ice-cold Dr Pepper, kept a sweating bottle of it at her side as they waited for their food. Thin slices of pork, ringed in fat crisped in its own grease in the pan, dirty rice, and grilled onions, with pickled cabbage and sliced tomatoes on the side.

“The first two drinks went down on an empty stomach, and Randie grew strangely quiet, her fingertips grazing the tabletop in time to the slide guitar coming from the jukebox.” (p. 339)

Unfortunately, drinking and overeating don’t agree with Randie! Sometimes there’s an overdose of realism in this book. 

Reviews © 2025 mae sander

History and how to disrespect it

The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah describes a noble cause: fair pay and working conditions for farm workers. The story embodies this noble cause in the lives of a few characters who learn from experience why humane treatment of workers is a cause worth living for. Specifically, this historical novel describes the hardships of the dust bowl era in the Texas Panhandle and the effort of one small family to find a better life in the cotton fields of California — where they instead discover how badly the migrants like themselves are treated, and how the cause of organizing for workers’ rights is crucial.

If a noble cause was all it took to make a great book, this would be a great book. Unfortunately, a few other things are lacking here. First, it’s a historical novel full of small details that the author didn’t bother to check. Second, the characters are presented as romantic and tragic and heroic but the actual portrayal is not very convincing, original, or well-written: there’s a lot of pathos, not much depth; further, there’s an overwhelming amount of repetition in the descriptions of features like the symptoms of starvation shown by the migrants. And third, the narrative is far too dependent on cliches and over-used language, especially in the dialog and the portrayal of the Italian family of the main character’s husband. I marked some specific examples, but they are really on almost every page, so I’m not going to quote them here.

However, I want to give a few examples of small but to me indicative points to illustrate the flawed historicity of the novel. These are clues about the author’s careless attitude, and maybe not important in themselves, except as indications of generally sloppy research.

• During the family’s time in the Central Valley of California, a flood destroys the migrant workers’ campground, and the residents lose their scant and pathetic possessions. The Red Cross comes to the assistance of these victims. Sweet, isn’t it? Just what we expect to happen. But in reality, prejudice against the migrants was so severe that the local chapter of the Red Cross (at least, a chapter in the general area of the novel’s fictitious town) prohibited aid to migrants! My bullshit detector was triggered by the mention of the Red Cross, which doesn’t have a great reputation for this type of aid, so I looked it up. No help for Okies here! (source)
• The novel is full of food descriptions, which I found very suspicious — too stereotyped, too much variety, too similar to American foods and Italian foods now. I won’t bother you with details, except to point to the fatal flaw in so many historic novels (often good, well-researched ones). Authors believe that tiramisu is an old traditional Italian dessert, but in fact the recipe was invented and NAMED in the 1970s. It doesn’t belong on an immigrant’s table in the 1930s! I have complained about anachronistic tiramisu in other historical novels, too (see this: https://maefood.blogspot.com/2021/11/tiramisu.html) Errors in food history, in my opinion, point to a sloppy attitude on the part of the author, who doesn’t care because she thinks her readers don’t care.
• Throughout the novel, a lucky US penny is a key item in the life of the main character and her immigrant in-laws. It came into their possession as they were leaving Sicily: they found it on the street. The wheat sheaves on the obverse of the penny to them meant prosperity and promise from the new country they were heading for. What bothered me is that the design of the so-described penny came into circulation in 1909, and the details of the parents’ immigration would set their departure several years earlier. Not important, maybe, but it tells me that the author thought attention to historic detail was unimportant. 
• Elsa, the main character, and later her daughter are great readers, and loved libraries. I was a bit suspicious of the breadth of Elsa’s reading — she lived in such a small town, but owned many books. Her daughter later asks a librarian for a recommendation for reading, and the librarian offers her the Nancy Drew mysteries. This really seems questionable, because at that time, librarians thought the very popular kids’ series books like Nancy Drew were not literary enough and they had higher goals for what they wanted kids to read. I verified this by finding an article on the topic: it wasn’t until the 1960s that librarians would have offered such books. This is in fact my own recollection from my own childhood in libraries! (The article, “Scorned Literature,” is fun to read for its own sake.)

The author vaguely addresses her inconsistencies in the end notes: “Primarily where I diverged from the historical record was in the timeline of events. There are instances in which I chose to manipulate dates to better fit my fictional narrative.” (p. 354)

This doesn’t really explain her lack of attention to detail, which I feel is important in a historical novel.

Frankly, it you want to read or hear about the dust bowl, the Okies, the migrant workers in California during the Depression, and the related political issues, I would recommend that you read Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath or watch the Ken Burns history series titled “The Dust Bowl.” You could even read some actual historical research, though most likely, it wouldn’t have seamy (though trite) sex scenes like the novel.

Looking Up Some Facts

You can see that I did have fun looking up some of the background about the Dust Bowl and the details of the lives of the characters in The Four Winds. I really wish the book had been better! 

I found a few sources that indicated that the book sometimes was a pretty good reflection of history. Dallhart, Texas, a town in Dallam County, was the birthplace of Elsa, the main character. For one thing, Elsa loves the library (though its founding date was one of the facts that the author shifted to make a better story).  I found some interesting material in the website of the Texas State Historical Association:

The Dallam County Public Library, the first county library in Texas, opened for circulation in January 1921. …

During the drought years of the 1930s Dalhart was notorious for its "black dusters" (see DUST BOWL). R. S. (Uncle Dick) Coon, a wealthy businessman who owned the DeSoto Hotel, became legendary for his generosity to depression-stricken farmers and cowboys. In August 1934 Dalhart became the site of one of the first three erosion-control demonstration projects in Texas, sponsored by the federal land bank, and the first to be devoted specifically to wind erosion.

What Reviewers Said

Some of the reviews of this best-seller seemed to have a reaction pretty much like mine. For example, the Washington Post review was titled "‘The Four Winds’ is Kristin Hannah’s next inevitable bestseller. Don’t forget the tissues." Its conclusion:

In fact, despite the strong echoes to “The Grapes of Wrath,” Hannah may be working closer to 19th-century melodrama. The heroines of “The Four Winds” are purely heroic; its villains wholly evil. Hannah never risks ambiguity; her pages are 100 percent irony-free. And she moves with a relentless pace. Her prose, so ordinary line by line, nevertheless accumulates into scenes that rush from one emergency to the next — starving! beating! flooding! — pausing only for respites of sentimentality. (There’s a little boy in these pages so sweet he could be ground up to flavor 8 million cupcakes.)

Despite Hannah’s extraordinary commercial success, the snob in me wonders what this indefatigable author could produce if she endured a little tougher editorial criticism and gave herself a little more time. (She’s published 24 novels in 30 years.) But that would mean fiddling with the well-oiled machine that reliably produces such marketable passion. I confess, I spent too long rolling my eyes at the flat style, the shiny characters and the clunky polemics of “The Four Winds” before finally giving in and snuffling, “I’m not crying — you’re crying!”

From Kirkus Reviews:

While she never overcomes her low self-esteem about her looks, Elsa displays an iron core of character and courage as she faces dust storms, floods, hunger riots, homelessness, poverty, the misery of migrant labor, bigotry, union busting, violent goons, and more. The pedantic aims of the novel are hard to ignore as Hannah embodies her history lesson in what feels like a series of sepia-toned postcards depicting melodramatic scenes and clichéd emotions. For devoted Hannah fans in search of a good cry.

As I’ve said, I wish this had been a better-written and better-researched novel, but at least it caused me to look up some interesting history articles!

Review by mae sander for mae food dot blogspot dot com. © 2022. 

Dara Horn: "People Love Dead Jews"

First, I wish everyone a happy and healthy and better year in 2022. For my first blog post of the New Year, I am writing about a new book that's a bit depressing, but profound in many ways. Dara Horn has written several novels and many op-eds and other types of essays for various publications. I've enjoyed reading two of her novels, A Guide for the Perplexed (2013) and The World to Come (2006).  I did not enjoy Horn's newest book People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present, a collection of her recent essays. It's a masterful work of genius, full of insights that I would rather not have.

People Love Dead Jews (published 2021)

What is it that I dislike about "feel good" novels about the Holocaust? Horn explains exactly what has bothered me more and more as the Holocaust gets further in the past and as rather shallow writers create their own imaginary Holocaust world that teaches the lessons they want to learn. Horn summarizes:

"We expect the good guys to be 'saved.' If that doesn’t happen, we at least expect the main character to have an 'epiphany.' And if that doesn’t happen, then at least the author ought to give us a 'moment of grace.' All three are Christian terms. So many of our expectations of literature are based on Christianity—and not just Christianity, but the precise points at which Christianity and Judaism diverge. And then I noticed something else: the canonical works by authors in Jewish languages almost never give their readers any of those things. (pp. 75-76). 

"Dead Jews are supposed to teach us about the beauty of the world and the wonders of redemption—otherwise, what was the point of killing them in the first place? That’s what dead Jews are for! ... This is far from a fringe attitude among contemporary readers, as just about every bestselling Holocaust novel of our current century makes fantastically clear. Holocaust novels that have sold millions of copies both in the United States and overseas in recent years are all 'uplifting,' even when they include the odd dead kid. The Tattooist of Auschwitz, a recent international mega-bestseller touted for its 'true story,' manages to present an Auschwitz that involves a heartwarming romance. Sarah’s Key, The Book Thief, The Boy in Striped Pajamas, and many other bestsellers, some of which have even become required reading in schools, all involve non-Jewish rescuers who risk or sacrifice their own lives to save hapless Jews, thus inspiring us all.... In addition to their wonderful non-Jewish characters, these books are almost invariably populated by the sort of relatable dead Jews whom readers can really get behind: the mostly non-religious, mostly non-Yiddish-speaking ones whom noble people tried to save, and whose deaths therefore teach us something beautiful about our shared and universal humanity, replete with epiphanies and moments of grace. Statistically speaking, this was not the experience of almost any Jews who endured the Holocaust. But for literature in non-Jewish languages, that grim reality is both inconvenient and irrelevant." (p. 80).

Horn discusses the content of Holocaust literature written in Jewish languages by survivors and also the contemporary accounts by Jews who managed to write something before they didn't survive. She finds that these are not in the least uplifting or beautiful. Some of the elements of such work are "confusion, starvation, denial, and sheer sadistic horror." (p. 83). 

The same problem, Horn explains, occurs in even the most well-meaning and carefully researched exhibits about the Holocaust and its survivors. One illustration was a lavish commercially produced and very accurate show, which required several hours to walk through: 

"At the end of the show, on-screen survivors talk in a loop about how people need to love one another. While listening to this, it occurs to me that I have never read survivor literature in Yiddish—the language spoken by 80 percent of victims—suggesting this idea. In Yiddish, speaking only to other Jews, survivors talk about their murdered families, about their destroyed centuries-old communities, about Jewish national independence, about Jewish history, about self-defense, and on rare occasions, about vengeance. Love rarely comes up; why would it? But it comes up here, in this for-profit exhibition. Here it is the ultimate message, the final solution.  

"That the Holocaust drives home the importance of love is an idea, like the idea that Holocaust education prevents antisemitism, that seems entirely unobjectionable. It is entirely objectionable. The Holocaust didn’t happen because of a lack of love. It happened because entire societies abdicated responsibility for their own problems, and instead blamed them on the people who represented—have always represented, since they first introduced the idea of commandedness to the world—the thing they were most afraid of: responsibility." (pp. 190-191).

In other chapters of People Love Dead Jews, Horn explores different themes and events, including the rise of antisemitism in our society, and her view of the numerous recent murderous attacks on synagogues and other Jewish places. She includes a very insightful essay about Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, contradicting conventional views of the play and whether it is antisemitic.  It's a fascinating and horrifying essay collection. I wish that some of my fellow bloggers who are so enamored of feel-good Holocaust fiction would read what Horn has to say and try to follow her insights, but I don't think it will happen. 

Review © 2022 mae sander

 

"White Rage" by Carol Anderson

Count me among the numerous people who are confined by the pandemic, outraged by police atrocities, and wishing we could find a constructive way to participate in the current nation-wide protests and peaceful demonstrations. Evidently many of us feel that learning more about the history of racism in our society at least means we are doing something -- the Washington Post says:

"This week, the best-selling books are mostly about race and racism." (link)

From one of the many lists of books that a well-intentioned white person should read, I chose White Rage by Carol Anderson. I thought I knew a lot about American history, but this book taught me new things in every chapter.

Anderson's prologue offers a useful explanation of the meaning of the term "white rage" --

"White rage is not about visible violence, but rather it works its way through the courts, the legislatures, and a range of government bureaucracies. It wreaks havoc subtly, almost imperceptibly. Too imperceptibly, certainly, for a nation consistently drawn to the spectacular— to what it can see. It’s not the Klan. White rage doesn’t have to wear sheets, burn crosses, or take to the streets. Working the halls of power, it can achieve its ends far more effectively, far more destructively." (p. 3). 

White Rage begins its historic exploration at the time of the Civil War -- "in 1860, 80 percent of the nation’s gross national product was tied to slavery." (p. 11). The economic value of slave labor was of course coupled to the complete lack of slaves' participation in the economic gains; the immediate aftermath of the war was that the former owners tried to re-harness the work of Black people without paying them. What is amazing is how they succeeded in making laws to uphold this goal, and how the former slaves suffered under the yoke of new oppression. I knew the outline, but the details still shocked me!

By World War I, the plight of Black people in the South was desperate. Jobs were opening in the industrial north, and the Great Migration of Blacks in search of a better life was underway. One thing that surprised me in White Rage was the account of the fanatic and abusive ways that the elected officials in the South attempted to prevent their near-slaves from leaving. (Need I mention that by this time, all officials were elected by white voters because Blacks had been deprived of the right to vote.)

Freedom of the press, at least in the North, enabled information to reach the would-be escapees. I was fascinated by the role of the newspaper the Chicago Defender in enabling the southern victims to escape:

"Central to the Great Migration, the Chicago Defender served as one of the primary conduits of information about opportunities up north. Using a far-flung distribution system of African American railroad porters, the paper extended its influence well beyond Chicago and deep into the Mississippi Delta. The Defender’s stridency, its unrelenting embrace of blackness, and its open contempt for white racist regimes turned a simple newspaper into a symbol of African American pride and defiance." (pp. 48-49). 

I learned so much about the early twentieth century! For example, I've always heard the term "race riot" -- here is a bit more from White Rage:

"Though labeled 'riots,' these outbursts were more like rampages, where whites went hunting for African Americans to pummel, burn, and torture. Killing was just an added bonus. In some instances, as in Chicago, blacks fought back. But in all instances, they were outnumbered. In Chicago alone, twenty-three African Americans were killed, and one thousand black families were left homeless. During the Red Summer of 1919 there were, in fact, seventy-eight lynchings, including a man burned at the stake in Omaha, Nebraska." (pp. 54-55).

Unfortunately, throughout the twentieth century, the established power of white people, both in the south and in the north, has continued to abuse the rights of the Black population. The book's descriptions were vivid and informative: lynchings, coordinated efforts to maintain housing segregation, lack of support for Black children's schooling (which was much worse than I knew), voter suppression, and many other forms of racial abuse have been commonplace and are still supported by American government at all levels up to and including US Presidents, the Congress, and the Supreme Court. As always in a good book the details are amazing, but I can't include them all here.

Throughout Anderson's coverage of the political events that occurred during my own lifetime, I nevertheless learned a great deal about the way that specific federal legislation, supported by court decisions, was either designed or transformed into ways to reinforce the disadvantages of Black people in our society. It's really depressing and at the same time enlightening to see the current situation in the context of all this history.

Another book on the list for current reading.
I read it when it was new --
My brief review is here:"White Fragility"

This review copyright © 2020 mae sander.

Charlotte Brontë's 200th Birthday Today

Charlotte Brontë Portrait
(from Wikipedia)

Happy Birthday, Charlotte Brontë! I am re-reading Jane Eyre to celebrate, but it's really not a very celebration-friendly book. From the beginning of the book, when Jane is aged ten, she has a strong sense of injustice being done to her, and a strong appreciation of the few people who show her kindness. The semi-starvation of the children in the charity school (where her arrogant aunt sends her) and the death of Jane's friend, who tried to have a calming influence on her, are vivid.

I'm finding reading to be painful -- and enlightening. For example, on Jane's first morning in the school, she and all the children are given burnt porridge for breakfast. Her description of the inedible and nauseating taste of burnt porridge startled me! Jane then learns of the kindness of the school head who arranges for the children to eat a bit of bread and cheese later -- and eventually is chastised herself, for coddling the children by feeding them anywhere near adequately. The reader discovers that the self-righteous clergyman who owns/runs the school is using hunger as a tool to put the orphans in their place.

Out of curiosity I checked to see how the book was received upon its publication in 1847. It was a bestseller, and also judged strongly for its frankness about sex. By modern standards, in contrast, the treatment of sex seems subtle, while the elements of cruelty to children and their deprivation due to the frequent death of their parents are the shocking part. Jane's rebellious reaction to cruel treatment seems normal to me, but not so much to reviewers at the time.

A review by George Henry Lewes praised the realism and innovative quality of the novel. A summary of his review appears on the British Library website. His review, according to the summary helps "to remind us just how great an impact this curious and unconventional novel had on the 19th-century literary and social landscape." Lewes, says the summary: "suggests that Jane Eyre introduced a new kind of female consciousness to the British novel. Reinforcing this idea, Lewes describes Jane as ‘a woman, not a pattern’"

Another website, "Contemporary Response to Jane Eyre," offers several quotes from reviews published soon after the novel appeared:

"The incidents are sometimes melo-dramatic, and, it might be added, improbable; but these incidents, though striking, are subordinate to the main purpose of the piece, which is a tale of passion, not of intensity which is most sublime." (The Atlas)

"Jane Eyre is, indeed, one of the coarsest books which we ever perused. It is not that the professed sentiments of the writer are absolutely wrong or forbidding, or that the odd sort of religious notions which she puts forth are much worse than is usual in popular tales. It is rather that there is a tendency to relapse into that class of ideas, expressions, and circumstances, which is most connected with the grosser and more animal portion of our nature; and that the detestable morality of the most prominent character in the story is accompanied with every sort of palliation short of unblushing justification." (The Rambler)

"Altogether the autobiography of Jane Eyre is preeminently an anti-Christian composition. There is throughout it a murmuring against the comforts of the rich and against the privations of the poor, which, as far as each individual is concerned, is a murmuring against God's appointment--there is a proud and perpetual assertion of the rights of man, for which we find no authority either in God's word or in God's providence--there is that pervading tone of ungodly discontent which is at once the most prominent and the most subtle evil which the law and the pulpit, which all civilized society in fact, has at the present day to contend with." (Eliza Rigby in the Quarterly Review)

I have only begun re-reading Jane Eyre, and I'm looking forward to the rest, though of course I know how it all comes out in the end! I also recently read a newly-published collection of stories reacting to Jane Eyre titled Reader, I Married Him: Stories Inspired by Jane Eyre by many authors, edited by Tracy Chevalier. So I'm very aware of the book's modern impact too.

I assume many articles about Charlotte Brontë have appeared today for her 200th birthday: an interesting one at the Guardian is: "The secret history of Jane Eyre: Charlotte Brontë's private fantasy stories."

The Senses

Grenouille, the central character in Patrick Süskind's bestseller Perfume, is missing something: something needed to make him fully or even minimally human. As a baby, born to an unmarried fishwife in mid-18th century Paris, he's rejected by his wet nurse. She perceives that physically what he's missing is any odor. "He's possessed by the devil," she says.

The priest who is responsible for the baby responds: "Impossible! It is absolutely impossible for an infant to be possessed by the devil.... Does some evil stench come from him?"

The nurse replies, "He doesn't smell at all." The priest demands details. She explains that the baby Grenouille doesn't smell "like human children ought to smell," which after quite a bit of questioning on the part of the priest she explains thus:

"They smell good all over. ... Their feet, for instance, they smell like a smooth, warm stone -- or no, more like curds... or like butter, like fresh butter.... And their bodies smell like ... like a griddle cake that's been soaked in milk. And their heads... smell best of all. [The crown of a baby's head] smells like caramel, it smells so sweet, so wonderful.... And that's how little children have to smell -- and no other way." (p. 12-14)

Odors, aromas, smells, stinks, miasmas, and above all perfumes dominate the intensely vivid descriptions of the book. It begins with all the stinks of the streets, markets, tanneries, stables, and waterways of Paris in that era, as the odorless baby and then child develops into a strange, unlikeable, and self-absorbed person. Having no smell himself, Grenouille nevertheless has a heightened sense of smell, a phenomenal memory for aromas and odors, and a vaguely inhuman way of reacting to them.

But Grenouille isn't just a man without his own natural smell, he's a man without humanity. In an effort to compensate for his missing human odor, he desperately apprentices himself to a perfumer, where he demonstrates remarkable abilities to create pomades, perfumes, elixirs, and other cosmetic preparations. He learns to capture aromas from both the inanimate (like a metal door knob) and the living (like a puppy). However, with a cold-blooded lack of compassion or any feeling at all, he grasps that it's necessary to kill in order to capture the aroma he finds most compelling -- that of a beautiful girl on the threshold of womanhood. The last part of the book turns into a horror story as he becomes an increasingly inhuman serial killer, and ends with a surprising and dreadful conclusion.

So many editions of Perfume in this screen shot from google images suggest how very popular it's been since publication in 1985.

Recent books I've read about the neuroscience of the senses of smell and taste and how the brain processes them often mention Süskind's book, which was published in 1985, at about the same time as the earliest modern studies of the subject. Süskind's descriptions of the mechanisms of smell are very interesting in this context. Grenouille can recall every smell he ever sensed. He can distinguish individual aromas in blended perfumes or streets full of multiple smells. These abilities seem to go far beyond what scientific tests show actual humans are capable of. 

Scientific studies usually focus on the interaction of smell and taste, what one author calls "how the brain creates flavors."  Süskind's character seems to find the taste of food unrelated to the complex and well-developed sense of smell that distinguishes him from other humans. In one long section, Grenouille lives as a recluse in a mountain cave, during which time he eats lizards and other vermin with no sense of disgust. Maybe his name -- meaning frog in French -- is relevant to this part of the tale. Other than his having been a very greedy baby (another fault found by the wet nurse) and despite his constant obsession with aromas, there's little about food, flavors, or cooking in the book at all -- only smells.

A famine seen by its victims

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind is a bestseller about a remarkable boy in Malawi. I'm sure I wasn't the only reader who had to look on a map to learn where in Africa was this small country. And now, having read the book, I feel as if the exact location isn't the important thing: William Kamkwamba shows us how humans anywhere can apply their intellectual curiosity and determination to build things to improve life, can overcome challenges that seem insurmountable.

Author Kamkwamba was around 14 years old when his dream of education was interrupted by a famine that impoverished his family: they could barely get food to eat, and definitely not pay his school fees. In an effort to keep up with the lessons he was missing, he began to read books from a small local library in the farming village where he lived. A science text described how to make a windmill -- and he determined that he would build one to bring electricity to his family.

Their needs were simple; when they didn't have money for kerosene lamp fuel or batteries for their radios, they spent idle evenings in the dark. Wind-powered electricity would allow them to light a small electric bulb, listen to the radio, or help neighbors by charging their cell phones.

Without any money, his creativity and grasp of how things work enabled him to patiently invent solutions to the challenges of needing blades for the windmill (made from old PVC pipe, flattened by heat); a dynamo and other moving parts from an old bicycle; washers made from beer caps; a structure made from blue gum tree poles; and many parts scavenged from old cars in a dump. The details and small successes along the way make fascinating reading. This book is crafted marvelously in the way it describes each step in his inventive creation.

The triumph of building a windmill is the most memorable part of the narrative, but I was also totally fascinated by the description of how his family ate in normal times, and of the day by day description of the famine. Everyday food for the people of his village was corn porridge with relishes such as greens, other vegetables, occasional meat, or sometimes insects like sweet ants or crunchy grasshoppers. They raised a few chickens and guinea fowl; their cash crop was tobacco. Kamkwamba and his friends sometimes snared small birds and ate them in their kids' clubhouse. He shared his food with his dog.

One year, no rain came. Crops dried up and it became obvious that the stores of food people kept would run out. Corruption in a new government regime meant that the reserves that previous administrations had kept for such emergencies had been sold to profit the rulers, and the types of aid that had been available were no longer there. Occasional food distributions were corrupt, inadequate, and led to near-riots. The long and detailed description of the months without food is horrifying and enlightening. I've never read anything so personal about a famine.

Slowly, food consumption declined until the family were eating only one meal per day, just a few bites of corn porridge, rarely any other food. Prices in the marketplace became sky high. His mother began to make corn into small cakes, sell them in the marketplace, and buy more corn each day -- enough to feed the family a small meal and sell more the next day.

Christmas was a cruel day. The family chickens that had been a hope for one day's better rations had become sick and died. Churches cancelled all festivities. Memories of soft brown bread, margarine, sugar, and tea for breakfast and chicken for dinner on earlier Christmases made this Christmas "like a punishment." (p. 115)

"As if overnight, people's bodies began changing into  horrible shapes. They were now scattered across the land by the thousands scavenging the soil like animals. Far from home and away from their families, they began to die." (p. 134)

Those who were fleeing from one place to another begged the Kamkwamba family for food, but they too were starving. Many families were selling all their possessions for just a few days' worth of corn.

The author and his friends tried to snare birds but had no grain to bait the traps. An outbreak of cholera and cases of malaria contributed to the misery. His friends became emaciated. "We were all losing weight. The bones began to show in my chest, and the rope I'd used as a belt no longer sufficed. ... My mouth was always dry. My arms became thin like blue gum poles and ached all the time.... No magic could save us now. Starving was a cruel kind of science." (p. 150-151)

After months of famine, the family mustered the strength to plant the next year's crops. When the first small ears of corn became just big enough to eat, they gathered them and finally had enough to eat. "I chewed slowly and with great satisfaction .... Each time I swallowed was like returning something that was lost, some missing part of my being. ... to have a stomach filled with hot food was one of the greatest pleasures in life." (p.157)

My New Cookbook

Published last week, Joan Nathan's Quiches, Kugels, and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Cooking in France is now number four on amazon.com's French cookbook bestseller list -- behind 2 editions of Mastering the Art of French Cooking and one other book. It's quite beautiful, with many color photos and historic illustrations.

I spent quite a bit of time reading the narrative parts of the text and looking over the pictures this afternoon (while simultaneously watching the Jon Stewart rally on streaming video). After also looking at the ingredient lists for the recipes, I expect I'm going to have fun trying the recipes. The background on Jewish life and cooking in France is quite enjoyable, though not very detailed. Nathan's recipes represent a wide collection from Jewish cooks she interviewed. I was a little surprised because she did not seem to search out historical recipes from earlier eras: just to find those that still maintain an active place in the living repertoire.

Nathan will be at the Jewish Book Festival in Ann Arbor Monday night to promote the book. I'm looking forward to hearing what she has to say about it, and assume she'll tell some more tales of the people she met and the homes, shops, markets, and restaurants she visited.

Ratatouille

Tonight I made ratatouille from the eggplant, zucchini, onions, peppers, parsley, and tomatoes I bought Saturday at the Farmers Market. While it was in the oven as shown, I looked up Julia Child's recipe for this dish on p. 503 of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. As I said earlier today, I've internalized quite a few of her recipes -- I can't imagine how many times I've come home from the market and made this dish.

I rarely look at the recipe any more, but I confirmed my claim. I used the ingredients she calls for -- in more or less similar proportions. The way I make it now includes, in addition to parsley, some herbs de provence, influence of my friend Michelle and her amazing kitchen in Cotignac in the Var region of France.

Michelle bought her vegetables at the little local markets in town -- for ratatouille, she says, you need only good eggplant, courgettes, herbs, and tomatoes. And she picked rosemary and sage from the weedy-looking edges of the fields and vineyards near her farmhouse (now sold). French food in general -- and as presented by Julia Child -- has always been based on good, local produce. If anyone views local and French as separate goals, they are only looking at American fads, not at basics.

I have changed Julia Child's method slightly, as well as adding more herbs. For one: eggplants now, according to experts, no longer need salting as they are not bitter -- especially not the very small white ones from the market. Further, instead of frying them, I now oil the slices and bake them on a heavy cookie sheet to save time. I'm not as fanatic about seeding the tomatoes as I used to be, either, as I think some of that jelly-like tomato pulp is quite flavorful when the tomatoes are so perfect and ripe. Also, as I make a large quantity I do the final cooking in the oven -- and I've already frozen some for next winter. Does this disqualify my claim that I am doing it by the Julia Child method? Ratatouille is not a finicky dish; measuring exactly would be silly. I think I've internalized it.

Well, that's one follow up to my post from this morning. Also important to me -- lots of people are still buying Julia Child's book as shown from the following amazon info about it:

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Popular in this category:

#1 in

Books > Cooking, Food & Wine > Regional & International > European > French

And by the way -- it was delicious! For another version of my dish see Oh, Rats.

Peg Bracken: She Didn't Hate to Cook

Today I read the obituary of a culinary figure whose books were popular in the 1960s: "Peg Bracken, 89; author struck a chord with the irreverent 'The I Hate to Cook Book'" by Elaine Woo, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer, October 23, 2007. My venerable copies of Bracken's most famous books -- with a 60¢ price on them -- are pictured at left.

I always found The I Hate to Cook Book and its sequels very amusing. I also learned a few good recipes from them -- especially "Cockeyed Cake" in Chapter 9, which is titled "Desserts or People are too Fat Anyway."

This chocolate cake recipe regularly appears in other easy-cooking sources: it involves a flour and cocoa mixture placed in a greased pan and then stirred briefly with oil, vinegar, vanilla, and water and baked.* Advantages: you need not have milk or eggs on hand, and you never have to wash a mixing bowl.

I Hate to Cook... offered just one cake recipe -- in Bracken's opinion, the ready-mix aisles of the supermarket "make you see clearly how far science has come." She suggests that "ready-mixes, fresh fruit, frozen fruit, canned fruit, and ice cream" should provide the solution to most dessert challenges.

Although I've read her books, I found much to learn from the article. Here are some highlights:

Peg Bracken, the dry-witted former advertising executive who relieved the kitchen anxieties of millions of readers with her 1960 bestseller, "The I Hate to Cook Book," died Saturday at her home in Portland, Ore. She was 89....

Bracken sold more than 3 million copies of "The I Hate to Cook Book," which helped busy women save time in the kitchen by cutting steps and shamelessly relying on convenience foods such as dry onion soup mix as key ingredients....

Although [Julia] Child addressed an audience eager for sophistication, Bracken -- who sold three times as many copies of her book as Child and company did of theirs -- spoke to everyone else. And although Child explained in step by voluminous step how to beat egg whites into a perfect froth or mash potatoes for gnocchi, Bracken stuck to tried-and-true basics, such as lasagna and beef stroganoff, leavened with a dash of sarcasm....

Culinary historian Laura Shapiro said Bracken wrote in a genre she calls "the literature of domestic chaos." Like Jean Kerr and Shirley Jackson (and, later, Erma Bombeck), Bracken approached the experiences of mid-20th century wives and mothers from an ironic perspective.

She also was truly interested in good food.

"James Beard used to cringe when her name came up," Shapiro told The Times. "He thought she was one of these can-opener cooks. He was underestimating her and misreading her. There was a real food person in there. She had no particular wish to get out of the kitchen. She just didn't want to be a maniac when she was in the kitchen."

*The Recipe for Cockeyed Cake:
1.5 cups sifted flour
3 Tbsp cocoa
1 tsp baking soda
1 cup sugar
1/2 tsp salt
5 Tbsp cooking oil
1 Tbsp vinegar
1 tsp vanilla
1 cup cold water

Put your sifted flour back in the sifter, add to it the cocoa, soda, sugar, and salt, and sift this right into a greased square cake pan, about 9 x 9 x 2 inches. Now you make three grooves, or holes, in this dry mixture. Into one, pour the oil; into the next, the vinegar; into the next, the vanilla. Now pour the cold water over it all. You'll feel like you're making mud pies now, but beat it with a spoon until it's nearl smooth and you can't see fhe flour. Bake it at 350 degrees for half an hour.

Over the years I have tried various changes to this, but I don't recommend any of them.

The image by the recipe shows the cover of the most recent edition, which seems to combine both volumes from the 1960s. However, the obituary in the New York Times notes: "Today, 'The I Hate to Cook Book' is out of print, doubtless a casualty of the Age of Arugula." From Peg Bracken, ‘I Hate to Cook’ Author, Dies at 89.