Kelby’s prose fits her subject, lusciously rich as the truffles and foie gras that dominate Escoffier’s recipes, but sensory...
From Kelby (Murder at the Bad Girl’s Bar and Grill, 2008, etc.), a fictional biography of the pioneering French chef Auguste Escoffier full of luscious details about his methods, both of cooking and seduction.
In the mid-1930s, after 30 years of separation, the aged and ailing Escoffier has returned to his wife Delphine, a poet. Sixty years ago he wooed her through his cooking—the sensuality of his food-centered seductions beats even the famous scene from Tom Jones—and their early marriage was joyful. But when he moved to London as chef at the Savoy, she refused to uproot the family to follow him. Lonely, he rekindled his earlier friendship with Sarah Bernhardt and also dallied with the English chef and hotelier Rosa Lewis. But his alter ego Mr. Boots courted Delphine from afar, sending her delicacies like figs. Eventually he realized that his heart truly lay with Delphine. By then their youngest son had died as a World War I soldier, a grief heightened by the fact that Escoffier had cooked a meal for Kaiser Wilhelm months before war was declared. Now Escoffier begins a memoir that captures the true stories behind his recipes and is full of sex and early-20th-century celebrity sightings. Her own health failing, Delphine hires a young woman named Sabine to cook for the extended family that gathers at their Monte Carlo home. Delphine, a local girl, has no idea how to prepare Escoffier’s sophisticated fare, but not coincidentally, she’s a dead ringer for the young Sarah Bernhardt. Both Delphine and Escoffier give Sabine lessons, and her evolution as a cook and as a woman offset the story of the ailing Escoffiers. Delphine desperately wants Escoffier to create a dish in her name as he has for his other famous patrons, but he resists. The complexity of their relationship almost defies even his ability to combine ingredients.
Kelby’s prose fits her subject, lusciously rich as the truffles and foie gras that dominate Escoffier’s recipes, but sensory overload eventually sets in.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-393-07999-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
In Clavell's last whopper, Tai-pan, the hero became tai-pan (supreme ruler) of Hong Kong following England's victory in the first Opium War. Clavell's new hero, John Blackthorne, a giant Englishman, arrives in 17th century Japan in search of riches and becomes the right arm of the warlord Toranaga who is even more powerful than the Emperor. Superhumanly self-confident (and so sexually overendowed that the ladies who bathe him can die content at having seen the world's most sublime member), Blackthorne attempts to break Portugal's hold on Japan and encourage trade with Elizabeth I's merchants. He is a barbarian not only to the Japanese but also to Portuguese Catholics, who want him dispatched to a non-papist hell. The novel begins on a note of maelstrom-and-tempest ("'Piss on you, storm!' Blackthorne raged. 'Get your dung-eating hands off my ship!'") and teems for about 900 pages of relentless lopped heads, severed torsos, assassins, intrigue, war, tragic love, over-refined sex, excrement, torture, high honor, ritual suicide, hot baths and breathless haikus. As in Tai-pan, the carefully researched material on feudal Oriental money matters seems to he Clavell's real interest, along with the megalomania of personal and political power. After Blackthorne has saved Toranaga's life three times, he is elevated to samurai status, given a fief and made a chief defender of the empire. Meanwhile, his highborn Japanese love (a Catholic convert and adulteress) teaches him "inner harmony" as he grows ever more Eastern. With Toranaga as shogun (military dictator), the book ends with the open possibility of a forthcoming sequel. Engrossing, predictable and surely sellable.
Pub Date: June 23, 1975
ISBN: 0385343248
Page Count: 998
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1975
BOOK TO SCREEN
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