So eccentric, long-winded, and overblown, it's almost endearing.
A saint in the kitchen: the legend of a culinary genius recounted by her most devoted disciple.
“Every day I get something from what my love made of me, and if I can live my life on good terms with myself it’s only because my exclusive, absolute, imperishable love transformed the boy I was, conventionally eager to succeed, ordinary, pragmatic, into a young man capable of marveling and sacrificing.” To present the story of a renowned restaurateur known only as the Cheffe, NDiaye (Ladivine, 2016, etc.) has created a uniquely unreliable (and unnamed) narrator, the chef’s former apprentice and No. 1 fan, now living in boozy retirement on the Spanish Mediterranean. In his hands, the life of the Cheffe is a hagiographic fairy tale, complete with an ugly witch—the Cheffe’s daughter, whom the narrator is still furiously fighting for favor even long after his mentor’s death. “I have my own opinion, you’ve met her, you’ve seen that unpleasant, sterile woman, arrogant and vain and now trying to peddle specious anecdotes about the Cheffe to the whole wide world.” The preferred version of the story—the narrator’s version—begins once upon a time in the village of Sainte-Bazeille, where a sweet little girl was born to destitute farm laborers. They put her to work in the fields, then sent her away as a teenager to work for some wealthy weirdos in a neighboring town. Obsessed with food, the Clapeaus install the girl in their kitchen, where she discovers her vocation: “Now, moved and joyous, she realized her body was made up of many little animals who’d learned to work flawlessly all on their own, and who, that afternoon, happy, modest, at once obediently and quietly enterprising, showed her all their savoir faire, working as a tight-knit team that in a sense excluded the Cheffe for her own good.” My, my. The mice and bluebirds that sewed Cinderella’s ball gown take a backseat to these industrious creatures. What specious anecdotes could that awful daughter possibly come up with to match these?
So eccentric, long-winded, and overblown, it's almost endearing.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-52047-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
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