No parsley, no sage, no produce of any sort. It was spring. March. But a false spring in which crops would fail for the third year running.
Our ageing unnamed narrator remembers the year she spent working in an Italian mountain top restaurant sufficiently elevated to lift it above the smog that had enveloped the world. Aged twenty, she defied her mother’s plans for her, determined to build a career as a chef, storming out of their apartment, scooping up her mother’s cat out of spite. Nine years later, faced with the bill for her mother’s apartment burnt down by protestors, she applies for a post more in desperation than hope but impresses Aida, her employer’s daughter, enough to be offered it. While the rest of the world starves, our narrator is given unlimited supplies of the richest ingredients with which to feed the Sunday guests who must be convinced that Aida’s research project will save them. By the time our narrator understands that her cooking is not the only reason she’s been chosen for the task, she and Aida are passionately involved. After a tragic misjudgement, our narrator decides it’s time to leave.
Bare walls, mismatched silver. But when I bit into my entrée new universes flared one after the other flags drawn from a magician’s hat, a perturbation of worlds inhabited during famine as I, on a mountain, reproduced the food of past empires.
Zhang’s novel explores an all too believable future in which the rich are prepared to go to any lengths to save themselves from catastrophe while ignoring the fate of those less fortunate. Our narrator is called upon to pander to their decadent tastes, preparing food she no longer has the palate to enjoy – numbed partly by a subsistence diet, partly by the knowledge of famine outside the mountain top. Zhang evokes the viscerally powerful link between food, memory and home, describing flavours and textures in vividly sensual language. Our narrator’s inability to enjoy the food she produces underlines the division between the rich whose palates must be wooed to extract their money and the poor, screaming in fury at the gates of the research compound. A dark novel – one that I admired rather than loved – but ultimately a hopeful one, and certainly the first I’ve read whose acknowledgements are devoted to dishes eaten and books about food read by its author.
Hutchinson Heinemann: London 9781529153668 176 pages Hardback (Read via NetGalley)
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Have you seen The Menu with Ralph Fiennes? Another take on cooking for the super-rich, with touches of Glass Onion. Absolutely brilliant.
No but it sounds great. I’ll add it to my viewing list. Thanks, Elle.
This sounds horribly believable….
It does, indeed
Hope this doesn’t happen during our life times. The acknowledgement sounds nice and different and the author one to certainly explore.
I got the impression she enjoyed her research!
After all I said the other day about our tastes being similar, today I am admitting that I just couldn’t get on with C Pam Zhang’s last book. This does however, look promising, so I’ll have to give it a go. Promising in the readable sense, not in the prophesied and all too believable future.
Not an easy book to like (and nor is this one) but I did find it impressive, particularly the descriptions of landscape.
I’ll approach it with an open mind. The library service has it on order, so I’ll look out for it.
What a fascinating premise, unfortunately it also sounds horribly possible.
Sadly, true.
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I do like a novel set in the restaurant world so this sounds fascinating
And a most unusual restaurant it is!
It was just so amazingly informative novel for me. I, before reading this delicious piece, never knew about so many food delicacies. But now i think I’m ready to visit a restaurant to order all those delicacies.