THE CUTTLEFISH
by Maryline Desbiolles & translated by Mara Bertelsen
This slim 1988 récit, the author’s first US publication, is an early example of the newly popular genre of the F&S (Food & Sex) novel—a la such particularly successful examples as Joanne Harris’s Chocolat and Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate. What Desbiolles brings to the table is a dreamy meditation on the sensuality of food preparation, as her narrator senses and communicates psychic connections between the “diaphanous shapelessness” of the cuttlefish and the fluid elusiveness of her memories and imaginings. Tantalizing brief images of her past and present do gradually clarify somewhat, but it’s all fairly insubstantial.