Elemental acuity and burlesque combine here to delicious effect.
Food as memory, memory as food, experienced with the unexpectedness of déjà vu, knocked between melancholy and humor, as summoned by newcomer Opincar.
In this short, intense memoir, the author ranges freely as he looks back on the food in his life and how it has intersected and toyed with his emotions. The writing is offbeat, achieving the trick of seeming at once grounded and untethered. With twisted charm, Opincar will praise the hen for its “inexplicable, almost comical” selflessness, or, in the process of buying basil plants, note that most of the plant professionals he has met are “thin, strange, and practical.” He offers a savvy little disquisition on turmeric, a sweet vignette of a taco stand in Tijuana, and a funny description of the curious cheese fleur de maquis, which “looks like something an animal buried in the forest . . . like something only a brave person might poke with a stick.” Opincar is just the man for the job. Example follows savory example of all the instances when food triggers memory: an aunt hurling cornmeal mush at his father, saffron evoking the sadness of exile, an abortion tied to chocolate and cinnamon, black radishes conjuring up rainy days, and garlic reminding him of the affection of his parents, while the non-garlic-eating couples filed for divorce, Opincar remembers “my mother in a loose shift dress, my father in shirtsleeves . . . speaking in low voices, laughing.” He darts suddenly between a kosher vegetarian restaurant in Jerusalem and a favorite stuffing with a recipe that “called for only one cup of butter, but I knew that three cups yielded a better result,” in a style that is reminiscent of Simon Loftus's Pike in the Basement, though very much possessing its own odor. Quoting Huysmans—“the scent of her underarms easily uncaged the animal in men”—Opincar elaborates that this is “a bacterial process not unlike that in ripening of cheese.”
Elemental acuity and burlesque combine here to delicious effect.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-56947-334-X
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2003
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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