COOKING IN THE WRONG CENTURY

A deceptively simple recounting of a small European dinner party in which even tiny details reflect global truths.

Imagine a mashup of a Renaissance-era Bruegel canvas and a 21st-century Grayson Perry sculpture that somehow encompasses all that came between and you’ll approximate the feel of this at once heady and heavy narrative. A youngish Austrian couple, known only as the hostess and the hostess’ partner, invite another couple, known as the husband and the wife, along with a Swiss professor, to the hostess’ new apartment for dinner. Over several bottles of crémant, nibbles, then quiche and salad, their interactions reveal their personalities, histories, and vulnerabilities, from the partner’s embarrassing the hostess on to the academic’s callous disregard for the cigarette ashes he drops on the balcony of an immigrant neighbor. No neoliberal stone will be left unturned as alternate versions of the evening slide into each other—sometimes the quiche is carefully blind-baked, sometimes not—and contrasted with how different it all would have been in an earlier time: “The unfulfilled wishes of her mother’s, grandmothers’ and great-grandmothers’ generations.” The author, who won Germany’s prestigious Bremer Literaturpreis for this book, neither ignores nor dwells too long on what was, for that country, a decidedly “wrong” century, instead moving on to Angela Y. Davis’ Freedom Is a Constant Struggle and then to the astonishing ease with which these privileged characters can travel and buy goods from other countries, knowing about and able to make recipes with any ingredients without having to consider seasons and frugality, as their forbears did. At the same time, the author holds some issues up to the light: “the thing that re-formed itself as feminism every decade, behaving differently each time.” From there, it’s a short leap to the sensuality of food and sex, the academic licking a vinaigrette-stained finger, a long list of tempting food photos from Instagram intertwined like the conversations held between different groups (an American couple appears at one point, underscoring how confusing our country is right now for Europeans). In the end, the novel is not an indictment of privilege, but a greatly magnified and irony-laden slice of life.

This impressive novel feels at once modern and eternal, like a perfectly balanced and freshly honed chef’s knife.