Crescent by Diana Abu-Jaber

Crescent is one of the many books that have been filling up my TBR shelf for years, staring at me every time I walk by with a library book. I finally picked this one up since it's on the pile of the books I've owned the longest -- more than six years of being schlepped from house to house.

I think the fact that I've owned this book for so long, I really, really wanted it to be good.  I read more than 100 pages and I just wasn't in love with it, but I still forced myself to finish it.  I hate to admit defeat.  And yet, if I finish a book I didn't like, I get really annoyed with myself for wasting the time on it. I am at best ambivalent about this book.  I'm not sorry I read it, but I can't say I recommend it either.

This is the story of Sirine, a 39-year-old chef who has never found true love.  She is blond and beautiful and half Iraqi, and her parents died when she was 10, leaving her to be raised by her Iraqi uncle.  She doesn't know much about her heritage except through her cooking, which is wonderful.  Many men flock to her because of her looks and culinary talent, but she drifts from man to man.  In Crescent, Sirine may find true love with Hanif, a mysterious Iraqi scholar and friend of her uncle.  There are other men in the story, including the flirtatious Aziz, a renowned poet; and Nathan, a photographer with a lot of emotional baggage.

I think the problem with this book is that it may have been overly ambitious -- just too many elements that didn't seem to come together at the end.  There's the love story between Sirine and Hanif; the big mystery about Hanif's past; Nathan's erratic behavior; Sirine's quest to learn more about her Iraqi roots; et cetera, et cetera.  Plus, lots of descriptions of food, since Sirine is an amazing chef.  And did I mention every chapter begins with an excerpt of a tale told to Sirine by her uncle?  There's a lot going on here, probably too much.  For me, the book lost focus.

The biggest flaw I found in the book were the characters -- honestly, they just weren't all that interesting.  Sirine, the heroine, is 39, a fabulous cook, and beautiful.  That's pretty much all I can say about her.  Oh, and she still lives with her uncle, which is weird since she's nearly 40, and of course, because she is so stunning, many men fall in love with her, but she doesn't seem to get attached to any of them.  Her parents died when she was young so I guess that is the reason why.  Plus, there were some plot elements that were quite obvious and contrived, and the ending seemed tacked on.

Maybe beautiful characters don't really need that much development or back story.  But seriously, umpteen descriptions of her beautiful blond curly hair are not a substitute for character development.  Within the first couple of chapters, Sirine has multiple men falling all over themselves to be with her, often at the same time.  Frankly, this bores me.  I'd much rather read about flawed, well-rounded characters that aren't so pretty.

There were a few elements of this book that I did like.  The writing is pretty good, and I did rather like the recurring story told by Sirine's uncle.  That was the most interesting thing in the book, and I wish the author had just stuck to that.

The Hundred-Foot Journey by Richard C. Morais

I really wanted to like this book.  I love food fiction and travelogues, especially anything about France.  This book had so much potential, but sadly, it fell short.

Let me begin with a quick synopsis:  Hassan Haji is a young Muslim boy living in India.  His family owns a very successful restaurant, and Hassan spent many happy childhood days in the family’s kitchen with his beloved grandmother.  They’re forced to flee the country due to anti-Muslim uprisings.  His mother is killed in a devastating attack, so the extended family moves first to England, then finally in Lumiere, a small town in the French Alps.  Hassan’s father is determined to start the first Indian restaurant, with young Hassan as the chef.   However, this is met with considerable resistance by Madame  Mallory, owner of a highly respected traditional French restaurant across the street.  Things get ugly, and are finally resolved when Hassan, a culinary genius, is apprenticed to Madam Mallory.

I got an ARC of this book from Amanda at the Zen Leaf – she didn’t care for it much either, but one of her concerns was that she didn’t like food fiction enough to appreciate it properly.  Well, I’ve read lots of food fiction, and I’ve worked as both a professional cook and as a food writer, and I still didn’t like this book.

To me, the book’s biggest fault was the lack of character development.  Hassan and his family members felt so flat, so one-dimensional.  It seems like Morais did more telling about the characters than showing.  For example, Hassan tells us that he can’t have a real loving relationship with a woman because of his mother’s death when he was a boy, but we really don’t get any examples.  A lot of family members are introduced, but barely described.  However, the food, the restaurants, and the location are very realistic.  I think the writer spent so much time on these elements that he forgot about the characters and the plot. And the plot – well, it just didn’t make a lot of sense to me.  I don’t want to spoil it for anyone who might want to read it, but before Madam Mallory takes Hassan under her wing, she does something terrible, something so bad which I frankly think would be unforgiveable.  And the results of this devastating incident are barely mentioned again for the rest of the book!  That made absolutely no sense to me.

I know as a reader I should suspend disbelief, but there just seemed to be so many plot holes.  I think the writer knew a lot about food and wanted to write a food novel, but it’s pretty obvious to me that he’s never worked in a restaurant.  Seriously, there is no way anyone with no actual restaurant experience could suddenly become head chef of a restaurant serving more than 100 individual plated meals per night.  Hassan is chosen to be the chef because he spent so much time watching his grandmother cook, but I am sorry, this is nothing like cooking multiple different dishes for diners at a restaurant.  It isn’t even like cooking for a huge party of 100 people.  (Which is why so many people think they could have their own restaurant because they like to cook.  And they usually fail).  I don’t care if Hassan is a culinary prodigy, this kind of skill takes years to acquire through hard work.  That’s why many chefs usually start at the bottom and work their way up, and a lot of them don’t even have certificates or degrees; they do it the old-fashioned way.

Besides, I'm really getting tired of the prodigy trope -- Hassan is a brilliant chef because he is just born that way, with the ability to cook and taste and pair foods together unlike anyone else, with little training other than hanging around his grandmother's kitchen and selling street food as a teenager!  Hassan's talent was just a little too miraculous for me.  And it's barely worth mentioning that the author throws in a couple of other annoying things, like random comparisons of food to genitalia, which was so out of character to the rest of the book -- is he borrowing from Henry Miller or just trying to show that he's edgy?  Also, one scene includes a character with Tourette's syndrome, seemingly for no other purpose than to insert repeated f-words.  Again, this had no connection to the rest of the book, and it was so incongruous that it was irritating. 

This book is really short, less than 250 pages.  It had some good ideas but it really seemed unfinished.  The author, Richard Morais, was an editor at Forbes, but he doesn't seem to realize that just because you can write and you know about food and travel doesn't mean you can write a good novel about food.     

The Cookbook Collector by Allegra Goodman

The Cookbook Collector is described by the publisher as a "modern take on Jane Austen."  Le sigh.  As I have mentioned in previous postings, I am not a huge fan of authors borrowing plots and characters from classic lit.  (Or contemporary lit, for that matter, but I don't see it much due to copyrights).  In fact, I probably would have avoided The Cookbook Collector like the plague, except that A) the title includes the word cookbook, which always makes me perk up my ears since I adore food fiction; and B) -- and this is the real shocker -- my husband mentioned that he wanted to read it.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

My husband is a wonderful person and a loving and supportive spouse, but contemporary lit is not his cup of tea.  Apparently he was listening to a review on NPR that compared it to Dostoevsky.  Well!!!  I marched right over to the computer and put my name on the library's hold list.  Sadly, this book bears little resemblance to Jane Austen; I haven't actually read Dostoevsky (he's on my to-read list, I swear), but I'm guessing not so much like his writing either.  Not that it's a bad book, but if you're looking for Jane Austen's trademark wit, you're out of luck.

Note:  if you have not read Sense and Sensibility, there may be spoilers below.  If you have read it, then there may be spoilers for The Cookbook Collector.   

To her credit, Ms. Goodman doesn't really stick that closely to a Jane Austen plot.  The two main characters are very loosely based on the Dashwood sisters from Sense and Sensibility, but just in that the older sister, Emily, is practical, like Elinor, and younger sister Jess is emotional and passionate like Marianne.  That's pretty much it.  Well,  Jess does have an older man who is attracted to her, and she does have an unhappy relationship with a young environmentalist, but it's really very little like the romance between Willoughby and Marianne like in S&S.  Jess, a graduate student, has a part-time job working for a rare book dealer, George.  The title of the book comes from an appraisal job George and Jess are working on, a collection left to a slightly eccentric woman by her even more eccentric uncle, who has a basically priceless collection of old and valuable cookbooks.  As Jess begins to explore and research the amazing collection, she discovers deeper feelings for George, and we all know how their story ends.

The Emily story was much more disappointing.  I suppose I would have liked it more if I hadn't expected it to be remotely related to Sense & Sensibility, which it really isn't, just that Emily is level-headed and practical like Elinor.  She's a dot-com millionaire!  How is this related to Jane Austen???

Seriously, the whole idea of a modern update of Jane Austen is really a stretch for me.  One of the dominant themes in every one of Austen's works is that women had to marry well because they had no other choices, and that just doesn't apply any more, at least not in Western culture.  Now, if you moved the action to the Middle East, I would probably find it much more believable.  Back in Regency times, if a woman of Jane Austen's class didn't have a dowry and couldn't find a rich husband, she was faced with few choices: marrying beneath her; becoming a governess; or becoming a spinster dependent upon her family's charity.  Nowadays women can pull themselves up by their high-heeled Manolo bootstraps and be pretty much anything they want, despite the glass ceiling.

This book also has a bunch of side stories about the dot-com bubble, backstabbing corporate politics; September 11 (again, not a spoiler if you notice that this book is set in the late 1990s); Judaism; long-lost relatives and family identity.  I really wish this book had focused more on the cookbook collector plot, since to me it was the most interesting part of the book -- not just the food-related aspects, but the relationship between Jess and George.  Of course, I also have a library degree, so I found the research into the rare books fascinating;  it's making me contemplate a return to school for classes in preservation and rare-book handling.  In general, I just think there was just too much going on, and not really Austenish at all. If this book hadn't been described that way, I probably would have liked it a lot more.

The Belly of Paris by Emile Zola

Portrait of Emile Zola by Manet

 I love any kind of food writing.  Books about food, memoirs with recipes, restaurant reviews -- I love all of them.  I've been fascinated by food and cooking since I was a child and watched Julia Child on PBS with my mother.  I also went to cooking school (not a famous one), worked as a pastry cook, and had the good fortune to have a short-lived career as a food writer. Needless to say, when I saw this new edition of Zola at my chain bookstore last year, I snapped it up.  Food fiction for the classics lover!  And French food fiction!  Who could write about food better than the French?

Sadly, this poor book languished on my shelves (next to Therese Raquin, also unread) until the Zola Classics Circuit was announced.  Joy of joys!  The Belly of Paris was pushed to the top of the to-read list.  And I am so glad I read it, though I'm sorry I waited so long.  This book isn't very long, but I found myself wishing it was longer.  I didn't want it to end. 

A summary, without spoilers:  set about 1859, the story begins with Florent Quenu returning to Paris after a long absence.  He was a political prisoner in Guyana, serving time for a crime which he did not commit during the uprisings in 1851 (after the Napoleon III, nephew of the the first Napoleon, overthrew the government and declared himself Emperor.)  Florent has escaped the horrors of Devil's Island and has returned to Paris, penniless and practically starving.  Soon he's is reunited with his half-brother who is married and running a successful charcuterie, a butcher shop that also makes sausages, pates, etc.  An old friend, Gavard, gets him a job as a fish inspector in the markets.   Poor Florent just wants a peaceful, quiet life but he is thrust into the world of Les Halles, with its backbiting and gossiping shop owners and food vendors, all of whom have their own agendas.  All this is set against a background of whispered unrest;  many people are still unhappy about the way Bonaparte took over the government. Also, Florent is uncomfortable living among the petty bourgeoisie (which include most of the food vendors) versus the poor -- what he calls the Fat and the Thin.

This isn't what you'd call a fast-paced book.  To be perfectly honest, there really isn't a lot of plot -- no twists and turns and suprises here, and only some of the characters are very well-developed.  Even Florent is a bit of a wet blanket for a hero.  However, it's a suprisingly easy read, and the writing and the descriptions elevated this book for me.  I felt like I was right there in the markets, smelling the fish, touching the fruit, and tasting the delicious pates in the Quenu's shop.  If you're not into food writing, this might not be the book for you. There are a lot of descriptions, which are frequently metaphors for the people in Les Halles.  In Chapter 5, Zola writes more than two straight pages of description of a fruit stand.  Here's an excerpt:

Behind [the saleswoman] were shelves of melons: cantaloupes, with warty little bumps, mariachers, with their skin like gray lace, and culs de singe, with their smooth bare humps.  The beautiful fruits were on display, delicately arranged with the roundess of their cheeks, half hidden in the baskets like faces of beautiful children, partly concealed by the leaves.  The peaches were especially beautiful, peaches from Montreuil with clear, soft skin like northern girls' and yellow sunburned peaches from the Midi, tanned like Provencal women.  The apricots lying in moss had the amber glow of sunset shining on dark-haired girls.  


This goes on for a couple more pages.  I must also point out that not all the descriptions are as delicious -- there are a few sections that describe some butchering and slaughtering which are pretty unappetizing.  Since Florent's brother is a butcher, there's also a lot of vivid descriptions about meat and sausage making, so vegetarians might want to skip over those parts.  But please don't skip the book entirely, as it's really worth reading. 

This is the third book in Zola's Rougon-Macquart cycle.  I did read some of  reader reviews for The Belly of Paris on Goodreads, and the general consensus was that this isn't his best work; Germinal, Nana, and Therese Raquin seem to be the favorites. But if this isn't his best, the other stuff must be great. After the rave reviews on the Classics Circuit of Therese Raquin and Germinal, Zola is moving way up on my to-read list.  I may have to read the entire 20-book cycle -- 19 more books to add to my to-read list!  I also need to go back and study the history of France.  Le sigh.

The Last Chinese Chef by Nicole Mones

I really did want to like this book.  It's about food -- a food writer! Traveling to China!  I thought this book would be exactly the thing I would love. First of all, I actually did have a paying job as a food writer, so I know a little bit about it.  I've also been to culinary school (though, I admit, it was no CIA or Cordon Bleu; it was part of the city colleges in Chicago; nevertheless, I finished it and have a certificate.)  And I did actually get paid to work in several professional kitchens.   Plus, I've been lucky enough to visit China, both Beijing and Hong Kong.  So I was pretty interested in this book, and even suggested it to my library's book discussion group.

Unfortunately, I am pretty ambivalent about it.  Here's the set up: Maggie, a forty-year-old food writer, is grieving over the loss of her husband, who died suddenly in an accident.  She gets the shock of her life when one of her husband's colleagues calls from China, with some upsetting news:  apparently her husband, who visited China frequently for work, had an affair with a Chinese woman, who has now named her late husband in a paternity suit!  She only has a few weeks before the Chinese courts will rule, so she has to move fast to find out if there's any truth to it.

Maggie calls her editor and explains that she will need some time off for this trip.  No problem, says her boss, who then offers her a great assignment:  interview a Chinese-American chef who has moved to Beijing to open a fantastic, Imperial-style Chinese restaurant. The chef, Sam Liang, comes from a long line of chefs -- his grandfather wrote a well-respected book on Chinese cooking, which he is attempting to translate into English.  Maggie agrees.  Turns out the restaurant has hit a snag, but said chef is about to enter a cooking competition, sort of the Olympics of Chinese cuisine.  He agrees to be interviewed about the competition instead.

So, we then have two intertwining stories: Maggie dealing with the knowledge that her beloved husband may have had a secret life, and this child who may or may not be his; and chef Sam, who is struggling with his Chinese family, including his estranged fatherl about his cooking style, his family history, and the competition. Of course, since they are both single, attractive, damaged adults, a romance is also involved -- will they or won't they?

As much as I wanted to love this book, I just couldn't.  First of all, it's short, only 288 pages, and it's also one of those hardbacks that are on the small side, which I think is the publisher's sneaky way of making the book look longer than it is.  Not that there's anything wrong with short books, but somehow this book seemed unfinished to me.  There's a lot going on in this story which could have been really interesting, but there are quite a few threads in this book that sort of went nowhere, or seemed unresolved.  Also, some characters were introduced that seemed unnecessary to the plot, and their presence seemed sort of forced and unnatural to the story.   And after reading the book, I still didn't feel like Maggie's character was that well developed.  I would have liked to learn more about her back story -- and Sam's, too, for that matter.  We know he grew up in America, his mother was Jewish, he hasn't been lucky in love, etc., but not much else.  It seemed to cut right to his time in China as though he suddenly appeared there.

There is a ton of great food writing in this book, which is one of its strong points.  If you have any desire to read about authentic Chinese cuisine, and the history of Chinese cooking, or what happened to all the fantastic chefs during the cultural revolution -- this book is great.  However, there were some aspects about the cooking that I found unrealistic.  This guy, a foreigner, has only been cooking Chinese food for four years and is now ready for this major competition?  The book points out how he slaved at his uncles' restaurants, but it also constantly points out how intricate and complex the food and cooking styles are -- it seems to me that's something that takes decades to learn, not something that you pick up that quickly.  And he only has a week to prepare for this dinner -- he spends an AWFUL lot of time chatting with this writer for someone so busy.    I did actually work in several kitchens during high-volume and high-pressure situations, and I honestly don't see a chef wanting to be interviewed when he's under so much stress.

Also, though Maggie has been a food writer for years, she can't cook.  At all.  Can't even boil water.  This to me was the MOST unbelievable thing about this book.  Now, I'm not saying that all food writers should be gourmets, or have worked in kitchens, or gone to school, but seriously, if you are a food writer, you are writing and thinking about food an awful lot of the time, which indicates that you are really, really, into it.  I find it extremely hard to believe that someone who has making a living as a food writer, who needs to write about chefs, techniques, ingredients, has observed -- as she keeps reminding us how writers are good observers -- and she can't even make a salad or roast a chicken?

Maybe I am just nitpicky.  I do know that Nicole Mones IS a food writer -- she wrote for Gourmet, and you can't get much more prestigious than that -- and lived in China, so she has the background and she knows what she's talking about.  I did love all the food writing,  and the history -- she gives some back story on Sam's father about why he refuses to cook or return to China, which is just fascinating.  Opulent cuisine was not appreciated during the cultural revolution, to put it mildly.  I would have loved an entire book about him and his story.

The descriptions of the food and cooking are just fantastic, and make me want to go back to China -- I'll admit many of the restaurants I visited were probably not as authentic as those in the book.  (Mones thoughtfully provides recipes and restaurant recommendations on her website.)  If you are interested in China, or fascinated by food, you might enjoy this book. I just wish the plot and character development were as delicious as the cuisine in this book.