Frankly, my dear, nobody gave a damn
March 7, 2012
I discovered a Southern novel often described as the one that deserved the classic status held by Gone With the Wind. Caroline Gordon’s critically praised fiction about the American Civil War, None Shall Look Back, came out in 1937, but by that time the reading public had fallen in love with Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler. According to an article about Caroline Gordon in The New Criterion, (October 1989), None Shall Look Back “promptly drowned in the wake of Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 Gone With the Wind.” The writer, Laura Weiner, further refers to Gordon’s response to what happened and also to the praise:
“Scarlett O’Hara was ‘a Civil War Becky Sharp, and Lord how they’re gobbling it up,’ Gordon wrote. ‘They say it took [Mitchell] ten years to write that novel. Why couldn’t it have taken her twelve?’ Oh, well. Katherine Anne Porter raved about None Shall Look Back in the pages of The New Republic and John Crowe Ransom sent Gordon a personal letter calling her ‘a Great Artist’ for having written it.”
The literary chatter about what could’ve been or should’ve been regarding None Shall Look Back made me curious, and so I found a copy – a first edition, no dust-jacket, south of $50 – and read it. There’s a Southern Classics Series paperback available; however, I wanted to read the ‘organic’ version, without notes or prefaces providing hind-sight interpretation.
None Shall Look Back begins with a birthday party celebrating 65-year-old Fontaine Allard, patriarch of Brackets, a prosperous Kentucky tobacco plantation near Clarksville, TN. The party introduces us to the key family characters, including Fontaine’s orphaned grand-daughters Lucy and Love, his sons Ned and Jim, and his nephews George Rowan and Rives Allard, from Georgia. Ned, George and Rives are surprise visitors to the party – they left school the night before, riding their horses home to join Lt. General Nathan Bedford Forrest’s Confederate cavalry. There’s a dance and some romancing on the plantation, and then the boys ride off to fight at Fort Donelson.
The strength of this story lies on the battlefields. Gordon puts us in the tents and through the binoculars of Union and Confederate commanders. She powerfully captures the troops as they wait for action and then fall into the horror of it. I don’t have deep knowledge about the Civil War battles and, in the case of Fort Donelson, read online about the 1862 surrender to General Grant. The historical background information made a huge difference in my understanding of what was happening in Gordon’s fiction. If only she had included a map of the battle, that would’ve been sufficient. Did readers in 1937 not need that?
Gordon anchors us most closely to Rives, who scouts for Lt. General Forrest and, along with Ned, follows Forrest in escaping Fort Donelson before the surrender. The two boys return to Brackets, where they hide in the woods from Union troops, who pillage and burn down the plantation house. With the Union victory and control of nearby Clarksville, Brackets’ plantation slaves have walked away and Lucy thinks, “…we are sinking, sinking; and they know it and have deserted us.”
Rives marries Lucy and takes her to his home in Georgia. Fontaine Allard collapses into ill health, and the family becomes dependent on others for their shelter and food. Rives continues to fight with Lt. General Forrest, whom Gordon portrays heroically throughout the novel, such as at Murfreesboro and Chickamauga. Meanwhile, Lucy nurses wounded soldiers with her mother-in-law in Georgia. Ned escapes from a Yankee prison and returns home a broken man.
Gordon’s characters are well-drawn but don’t call us to care about them. It makes for less dramatic reading – there’s no “I’ll think about that tomorrow” Scarlett O’Hara or “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” Rhett Butler to make us cheer and weep — but the historical significance of the Allards’ fictional lives more than makes up for the lack of emotional drama. There’s an unforgettable final scene of Rives on his horse “carrying the colors” into the middle of a battle, when the original carrier lost courage. Like so many other scenes in None Shall Look Back, it left me with an indelible portrait of the Confederate soldier in battle and, long after the last page, thinking about the American Civil War, more than Mitchell’s classic ever did.
Caroline Gordon (1895-1981) wrote nine novels and three story collections, as well as non-fiction. She was born in Clarksville, TN, where she lived with her husband, poet and critic Allen Tate, on family land.
The fall of the House of Darling
February 25, 2012
You would think we’ve had enough noise about investor fraud in the news to shy away from reading about the topic in our fiction. But this new thriller, ripped from the Bernie Madoff headlines, grabs attention that’s driven by that very familiarity. Early on, we know what’s going to happen — a Ponzi scheme exposed — but we don’t know how it’s all going to explode among the characters. That unknown, coupled with an insider’s view of Manhattan’s Upper East Side luxury culture, creates a time-ticking page-turner that unfolds Thanksgiving week, 2008.
Speaking of that insider’s view, The Darlings’ author, Cristina Alger, clocked in career time as an analyst at Goldman Sachs and an attorney at a Manhattan law firm. She was born and raised in New York City, the daughter of a major fund player who died in the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers. From the novel’s opening posh benefit event to conclusive confrontations at the New York Attorney General’s office, we get savvy, realistic details from someone who knows the ropes, the blue highways, you could say, of this cut-throat and tenacious high-finance terrain.
The novel begins with Morty Reis, founder of Reis Capital Management (RCM), ending his life at the Tappan Zee Bridge. The SEC is dangerously close to discovering RCM is nothing but fairy dust. His death unleashes a monumental scandal that hurls billionaire financier Carter Darling and his family into a limelight of regulatory investigation. The Darlings live the good life on Park Avenue and in the Hamptons, thanks to the family business, the enormously successful Delphic Fund that’s one-third invested in Morty’s RCM.
The day after Morty’s death, Paul, General Counsel at Delphic and husband to Carter’s daughter Merrill, gets a visit from the SEC, represented by his longtime friend, Alexa Mason. Alexa shares evidence of RCM’s Ponzi scheme with Paul, who’s blind-sided by the information, having only worked at Delphic a mere two months. She urges her friend to separate himself from the Darlings and inform on Delphic to protect himself. Alexa also shares what she knows about RCM with her uncle, who’s a journalist. Meanwhile, Carter’s lawyer Sol Penzell creates incriminating, backdated wire transfers to set up Alexa’s boyfriend at the SEC.
Alger skillfully maneuvers a complex web of characters that includes lawyers, journalists, fund managers and politicians. Of the two Darling daughters, Merrill is the smart one with a Harvard law degree. Her sister Lily is the IT Girl, whose shopping and social skills place her firmly in New York’s elite society. They and their parents are perfectly drawn to reflect the sacrosanct, privileged Upper East Side culture, a lifestyle that comes across as all-at-once desirable and yet unpalatable for its claustrophobic social demands and extraordinary financial requirements.
As Carter’s lawyer Sol works the holiday weekend to find a pawn to save the Delphic king, Merrill loses trust in her beloved father, realizing, “Nothing we have is real.” It’s not as much an epiphany for Merrill as an acknowledgement of a buried thought, a confessional wish for simplicity denied to her by the requirements of upper echelon New York society, a million-dollar apartment mortgage and 16-hour workdays. She wonders if she and Paul would be “happier somewhere quieter, less stressful, less competitive.”
Alger knows how to write a fast pace, moving us breathlessly through the holiday week with startling discoveries and unexpected alliances. Her debut is a satisfying novel, filled with many plot twists, each one as smart and surprising as the others. The Darlings is neither great nor memorable literature; however, it’s without a doubt excellent entertainment and a fascinating showcase of New York’s financial darlings.
Discovering Justin Cartwright
February 16, 2012
I picked up this novel after reading an interview with Sven Birkerts by Robert Birnbaum for The Morning News. The context of the title’s mention in the interview made the difference — Birkerts says, “My best reading experiences are always impulse grabs,” and Birnbaum replies that he discovered Justin Cartwright in that way. He mentions The Song Before It Is Sung, and I couldn’t resist checking out someone else’s impulse grab.
The Song Before It Is Sung became my own discovery of author Justin Cartwright, and the story touched a deep, thoughtful place inside me, thanks to the Rhodes Scholar protagonist, Conrad Senior. Conrad is a thinking character I couldn’t get enough of, admiring his pondering wit and stamina, especially while he gets soaked in the derision of his career-driven wife. Conrad does not earn much of a living from his free-lance writing, and he’s steeped in a project that’s failed to produce the book or film he promised to deliver to publishers and TV producers. He’s dear to my heart because he believes ideas have value in their own right. To his practical wife, Francine, Conrad is unreliable and wastes his time.
The present-day story of Francine and Conrad’s deteriorating six-year marriage runs parallel to this engaging novel’s more demanding other plotline, revealed through Conrad’s aforementioned project that so frustrates Francine: Conrad inherited boxes of letters and papers from his Oxford professor, Elya Mendel, and he’s sifting through them to find a story. Their content reveals Mendel’s friendship at Oxford University during the 1930s with the German Rhodes Scholar Axel von Gottberg. The friendship collapsed, however, when von Gottberg returned to his native land with the idealistic belief he could stop Hitler’s rise to power and restore the “good” Germany. Mendel, a Jew, believed von Gottberg to be delusional and even suspected him to be a Nazi sympathizer. He repudiated the friendship and undermined von Gottberg’s reputation among the Allies.
Justin Cartwright does an excellent job of seamlessly telling the story of the Oxford friends from a variety of sources, including the letters and what Conrad learns from the few who knew von Gottberg. He easily takes us back and forth in time, with the World War II story the darker element balanced by Conrad’s lighter albeit chaotic life of getting on without Francine. Both plotlines, however, reach an oppressive heaviness toward the end. Specifically, Conrad and Francine face a difficult decision for which there are no happy solutions without consequences. Meanwhile, we learn the unbearable details concerning von Gottberg’s brutal death that follows his participation in the historic assassination attempt on Hitler.
In the novel’s Afterword, Cartwright informs us that the Mendel-von Gottberg friendship is based on the true-to-life friendship of Isaiah Berlin and Adam von Trott. Berlin was a British philosopher and scholar, historian of ideas, essayist and political theorist. Von Trott was a Rhodes Scholar hanged for his part in the attempted assassination of Hitler in July, 1944.
The Song Before It Is Sung is an involving, unique story that explores how we deceive ourselves with false hope and ideas, how we love with blind expectation and how we misread our friends. It also explores the concept of what it means to be human. In his letter to Conrad, explaining the gift of his papers, Mendel writes, “It is true that you were not my most brilliant student, but I think, my dear boy, that you are the most human.”
Charged with violence
February 4, 2012
The Outlaw Album is the first book I’ve read by Daniel Woodrell, recommended to me by a colleague in my book world. Woodrell has published eight novels and is best known for Winter’s Bone, which was made into an Oscar-nominated movie. Speaking of Winter’s Bone, Denise Hamilton wrote in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, “If William Faulkner lived in the Ozark Mountains today … he might sound a lot like Daniel Woodrell.” More recent authors Woodrell might be aligned with are Carolyn Chute and Donald Ray Pollock, writers who’ve likewise pulled back the curtain on America’s rural cultures.
In Woodrell’s world in The Outlaw Album, we get Missouri’s Ozark version of Deliverance country, where “folks living hidden in the hills” function according to their own rules of family, survival and justice. While those rules in our world equate to criminal behavior, in theirs it makes sense, from burning down an outsider’s house blocking a river view to purposely swerving the car to hit a hitchhiker. It’s to Woodrell’s credit that we read with an understanding of what drives these characters into their misguided reasons. I wouldn’t go so far as to say we accept their logic, but we get it.
All you have to do is read the first story, “The Echo of Neighborly Bones,” and you’ll know what I mean. It’s about a man named Boshell who kills his neighbor to avenge the death of his wife’s beloved dog. This neighbor, Jepperson, is “an opinionated foreigner from Minnesota,” who disparages Boshell and his kind, calling them “you people.” He threatens to kill the dog, without any notion of being neighborly, because it’s going after his guinea hens. When the dog turns up dead, Boshell “kept to simple Ozark tradition and used a squirrel rifle.” He hides Jepperson’s body deep in the woods, territory once inhabited by Boshell’s family before the government annexed it for the National Forest; however, that’s after he’s kicked and stabbed Jepperson’s already dead body over and over and over again to feel better about all the things that go wrong for him.
Woodrell describes his Ozark characters as “these untamed people who shot at things to so plainly announce their sorrow.” They turn to violence for the most minor of reasons, one because a campground store owner was “cussin’ me in front of bitches.” They seek their own justice because the law “ain’t eager to come into our woods,” such as the girl who bashes her uncle’s head after he’s raped yet another Ozark tourist. Only, her uncle doesn’t die, and she becomes his cruel caretaker.
This may sound like bleak reading, but I didn’t find it to be bleak or off-putting at all. Some of the violence is difficult, but it’s tempered by Woodrell’s compassion for his characters. His knowing, sympathetic approach allows us to open ourselves to a poor, violently wired group of people who are a product of what life has given them in an isolated environment of steep hillsides, rock bluffs, thick forests and clear, rumbling rivers. Violence is not so much a choice as something they’re driven to: a viable option and their easy button.
The stories explore issues of prejudice, families with deep secrets and false heroes, frustrated love and the nature of violence bred into one’s soul. They show us that behind our densely populated urban and suburban worlds lie rural, backwoods cultures whose inhabitants deserve to be acknowledged. In the Ozarks, even if we don’t see them, they see us, “foreigners” building vacation homes and blithely bringing camping gear, canoes, swimming tubes and fishing rods into their backyards. In this beautifully written collection, one learns a pretty important rule to keep in mind – it’s best to be neighborly.
A book list and a control measure
January 26, 2012
The following new and relatively new books are sitting on my desk, only they’re not physically present on my desk. They’re represented by pieces of paper torn from pages in book review publications. I consider this growing handful of paper a reading table of sorts. Actually, it’s a control measure due to books now living on the floor in my house, something I said I would never allow. Clearly, books on the floor is a sign I need to control my literary acquisitions. Hence, this style of reading table that gathers paper as a first step versus impulsively acquiring at first love.
I share these books because readers who don’t comb book review journals, especially those from London, may not be aware of them.
Act of Passion by Georges Simenon
NYRB Classics recently published this Georges Simenon novel, Act of Passion, about a successful doctor who abandons his comfortable married life to pursue and attempt to possess a love interest. Sounds like a common plotline; however, in the hands of Simenon, creator of Inspector Maigret, the story’s probably a well-crafted stunner. The Times Literary Supplement writes, “Simenon creates a character both compelling and repulsive, clear-eyed and deluded at the same time.” The novel was originally published in 1947 in France as Lettre à mon juge, a more fitting title to the story, considering it’s written as an apology letter from the doctor to the magistrate in his murder trial. Act of Passion is translated by the late Louise Varèse.
Julia by Otto de Kat
Perhaps it’s unfair to list this novel because it’s not published (yet?) in the U.S., although you can still purchase it online. I’ve come across it a few times in U.K. reviews, and it’s one I’ve got my eye on. Julia by Otto de Kat was originally published in Dutch in 2008 and recently translated into English by Ina Rilke. This slight, 168-page novel concerns a Dutchman’s encounter with a woman (Julia Berger) for a brief time in Germany, 1938. From The Independent: “De Kat’s ambition of theme is served by astonishing tautness of construction and spareness of language, beautifully rendered by Ina Rilke. And, most movingly, the novel offers us glimpses of uncompromising virtue, not always in expected places.”
The Sealed Letter by Emma Donoghue
Canadian author Emma Donoghue may bring to mind her best-selling Room, a ripped-from-the-headlines story about a kidnapping. She also wrote The Sealed Letter. It was published in the U.S. and Canada in 2008, before Room. It’s historical fiction based on a scandalous Victorian divorce in 1860′s London. Picador recently published it for the first time in the U.K. It was reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement, where it got my attention. On Donoghue’s website, a quote from the Daily Mail says it’s ”a page-turning drama packed with sex, passion and intrigue.” Also, according to The New York Times review in 2008: “the plot is psychologically informed, fast paced and eminently readable.”
The Manuscript of Great Expectations: From the Townshend Collection, Wisbech by Charles Dickens
This book intrigues me because of the opportunity to experience an author’s decision-making, word by word, sentence by sentence, as he brings a story to life. It’s an exact reproduction in color and size of the hand-written manuscript of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. The museum that owns the 1860 manuscript collaborated with Cambridge University Press to produce the original papers in book format for the first time (according to this article in The Guardian). I love that The Guardian provides a gallery view you can click through for a taste of what’s inside the book. What a wonder to think this is how books used to be written. Pen and ink seems so much more of an intimate, demanding experience with words than typing.
The New Granta Book of Travel
edited by Liz Jobey, introduction by Jonathan Raban
This collection of travel narratives will be available in the U.S. April 2012. It’s been a while since I’ve indulged in travel memoirs. One of my long-time favorites is Mary Morris’s Nothing to Declare. More recently, I wanted to read but didn’t Ian Frazier’s Travels in Siberia. And so here, a collection of diverse travels essays calling to me. From The Independent: “What’s particularly interesting is how it illuminates the diversity of modern travel. In ‘Arrival’ we have an asylum seeker’s first experience of coming to Britain. Albino Ochero-Okello’s poignant tale turns the idea of travel for pleasure on its head. For a refugee, travel is a means of survival.’” Also, reading the book’s introduction via Amazon’s preview option, Jonathan Raban describes an essay about a Victorian-style imperial expedition into the heart of the Congo as well as a walk in East Ayrshire – ”Her journey lasts an hour or so, and covers perhaps a mile, but one need not travel far or for long to travel deep…”
How It All Began by Penelope Lively
I became a Penelope Lively fan with her Booker Prize-winning Moon Tiger, so a new book always gets my attention. How It All Began is getting positive reviews by the major U.S. papers, a story that starts with the mugging of a retired schoolteacher in London and then unfolds with the resulting consequences. The publisher’s website says, “Through a richly conceived and colorful cast of characters, Penelope Lively explores the powerful role of chance in people’s lives and deftly illustrates how our paths can be altered irrevocably by someone we will never even meet.” Sounds like another good one — How It All Began is Lively’s 20th work of fiction.
Meet the Lasts, Downton Abbey’s future
January 18, 2012
Evelyn Waugh’s 1934 novel A Handful of Dust satirizes Britain’s landed gentry, whose power and influence diminished between the World Wars. It’s a book that gets called out on “best” lists, such as Time magazine’s All-TIME Best Novels and Modern Library’s Top 100. Last July, John Self in The Guardian tagged it as Waugh’s greatest achievement in an article about writers being famous for the wrong book. I get that now, being a big fan of Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and presently a bigger fan of A Handful of Dust.
This greatest achievement became a beach read for me during a recent Florida visit. It came along in the suitcase as a book I’d intended to read before the close of 2011 and missed the deadline by a week. I didn’t think of it as beach material but wanted to meet my goal. Classics and bests carry a hovering stigma of something to be trudged through. That aforementioned Modern Library list also includes Ulysses and The Sound and the Fury, hardly sun, sand and surf material. Nevertheless, I sat in the beach chair – actually, a balcony chair overlooking the beach – and there read Waugh’s masterpiece for long hours of escape, completely surprised and delighted by this classic’s engaging force. This is one wickedly funny novel.
The book focuses on Tony and Brenda Last, who live on Tony’s inherited country estate, Hetton Abbey. It requires every penny they have to keep it going. Weekend visits by the London social set fill the Gothic structure’s cold, uncomfortable rooms. And while Brenda’s bored with the old house and its requirements, Tony lives for it. Not surprising, then, that Brenda escapes to London, where she engages in an affair with John Beaver, the novel’s moneyless social climber.
Waugh’s ingenious send-up includes many lively characters whose affiliation with the Lasts helps exaggerate their arrogant blindness. One most enjoyable is their literal-minded son, a young boy who, when told the London socialite Lady Cockpurse looks like a monkey, imagines her to be a ”hairy, mischievous Countess:”
“When kindly people spoke to him in the village he would tell them aboutt her and how she swung head down from a tree throwing nutshells at passers-by.
‘You mustn’t say things like that about real people,’ said nanny. ‘Whatever would Lady Cockpurse do if she heard about it.’
‘She’d gibber and chatter and lash round with her tail, and then I expect she’d catch some nice, big, juicy fleas and forget all about it.’”
Even though we realize Waugh is on a mission to ridicule country estate heirs and their privileged friends, he creates these characters without the drag of giving a lesson. It’s his witty, acerbic digs and savage humor that do the educational work and make A Handful of Dust so much fun.
A tragic accident on a fox hunt at Hetton Abbey hurdles the Lasts toward their downfall, with Brenda making a very telling and shocking remark. It’s an unforgettable moment in reading history, a blurted “Oh thank God” positioned with enormous implication. Despite the dark turn of events, Waugh skillfully controls the experience so we stay within bounds of the book’s irony and satire. He shocks us, and then lifts us right back up into the amusing divorce proceedings and a threat to Hetton Abbey, such as, in this scene, when Brenda’s brother negotiates with Tony:
“The truth is that Beaver is cutting up nasty. He says he can’t marry Brenda unless she’s properly provided for. Not fair on her, he says. I quite see his point on [sic] a way.”
“Yes, I see his point,” said Tony. “So what your proposal really amounts to is that I should give up Hetton in order to buy Beaver for Brenda.”
“It’s not how I should’ve put it,” said Reggie.
My reference to Downtown Abbey in this post’s title is a bit cheeky, considering I’ve not seen the popular PBS show, what with no TV in the house; however, from all I’ve read about it, I couldn’t resist the juxtaposition, for a Last perspective, so to speak. Because Waugh would’ve had a field day with this show about an English country estate and its inhabitants. But then, maybe he already has had that day in A Handful of Dust, which ends with Tony lost in a South American jungle and to Hetton Abbey. Indeed, Waugh’s greatest achievement.
Beware your assumptions
January 9, 2012
I’ll start with the ending, but I’m not going to reveal what happens in this story about Deputy Sheriff Ogden Walker, who “wouldn’t know a clue if it jumped up and bit him on his pecker.” I’m going to tell you that I got angry. Reading the last two pages of this triple murder mystery, I thought I’d been duped. I thought the author, Percival Everett, had written this suspenseful story about an unusual detective, exploring issues of racism, loyalty, identity and a purposed life – all the while keeping me guessing about who committed the murders — and then he writes a conclusion that’s unbelievable and feels like a smack in the face.
Call me frustrated and furious, except a persistent internal voice suggested I might have missed something along the way. Assumption is a literary class act, and I couldn’t imagine Everett would blow off the ending. It just didn’t fit. So I went back through the book looking for clues to herald the surprise ending, and I found them, demonstrating Everett’s written not only a remarkable crime novel off the typical grid, but also a cautionary message about the danger of assumption.
Deputy Sheriff Ogden Walker, a former employee of the U.S. Military Police, works for Sheriff Bucky Paz in the fictional “middle of no place” Plata County, New Mexico. His boss gives him free rein, despite Walker’s unorthodox ways, but then the quirky but reliable Sheriff Paz is pretty much into being left alone to eat his doughnuts. Don’t think for a minute we’re getting a tired policeman-doughnut cliché here. The Mrs. sends a nutritional bag of carrots to the office with her large hubby to replace the high calorie sweets, and the play between the foods and the frustrated fat man, who’s always looking for the easy button, is a trip. So, too, is Walker’s sharp wit, frequently given.
The murdered dead that turn up in this book include a bigoted woman no one much liked, two prostitutes who try to scam their pimp and a game and fish patrolman. Walker seems to get strung along while solving them, but his nose to the trail inevitably unfolds the mysteries that have clever, unpredictable twists and turns. He ends up in bars and brothels in Denver, a car dealership in Albuquerque and a nursing home in Tempe in search of answers, as well as the surrounding canyons and desert. This emotionally detached deputy rarely carries his gun and appears undaunted by threatening situations. Some say he has a messiah complex.
The crimes occur in three loosely connected sections of the book. You’ll have to read very carefully not to be whomped with the ending like I was. Although, even if you do read carefully, you’ll still be whomped, I’m sure, because Everett is playing a lot of cards in this well-crafted novel. Each one is designed to fit into a fanned out, calculated display that illustrates nothing makes sense in the way we perceive it to make sense. And that ending? Our thoughts and beliefs about people we know may not be their reality. It’s a kind of assumption that messed with me in the end. (Point made via experience.) Bravo, Mr. Everett.
“19 Pictures, 22 Recipes”
December 31, 2011
I found this unusual, 58-page book on a table at Brooklyn’s Spoonbill & Sugartown. The sales clerk told me the author brought it in, the store decided to sell it and purchases have been steady. I understand why. There’s something seductive about this self-published book: the soft feel of the pages; the intriguing black-and-white, muted photographs; the simple recipes with easy instructions and a handful of fresh ingredients; and the narrative about what we see and taste.
19 Pictures, 22 Recipes, while sub-titled “A Cookbook by Paola Ferrario,” is neither a photography book with recipes, nor a cookbook with pictures. It’s a sensual congregation of both, including essays. Ferrario tells personal stories, philosophizes about cooking and life, and provides interpretive thoughts about the photos. All the while, she emphasizes the exquisite pleasures to be experienced through simplicity. No need for expensive photography equipment to create a meaningful photograph, let alone some chef’s super meal to experience great taste.
Ferrario writes,“The photographer/cook only has to take what the planet has given and transform it into pictures or dishes with as little alteration to the original as possible.”
Consider her “Pasta with Tomatoes & Basil.” You just need a few Roma tomatoes, olive oil, garlic and basil, a simple recipe that makes a jar of Prego or Newman’s tomato sauce seem pointless. Ferrario pairs it with a Polaroid of a woman’s hips in a flowered polyester dress taken with a camera Ferrario purchased in a thrift shop.
“When I look at this picture I remember that my youth was serene because I was a dreamer with simple desires. I envied people who could dance well and read fast but never the ones that had more than I. Whenever I feel old or poor I make this dish, which is as beautiful as youth seems through the eyes of a happy middle age. It takes a little time to make and it costs almost nothing. It’s the perfect meal when we are assessing our needs.”
Paola Ferrario is a Guggenheim award-winning photographer represented by the Sue Scott Gallery in New York. She also is a cook by nature, telling us in the essay “La Scampagnata: An Apology” that hers is a generation of women who grew up having been taught how to cook and then choosing to cook in their adult lives. That choice is becoming more and more a rarity; however, given Ferrario’s musings here, it’s apparent we’ve needlessly complicated and avoided kitchen life.
My favorite pairing is “One-Egg Cake,” featuring the photograph of a newly built house. “The image freezes the moment when desire has become reality through labor, will and destiny,” the author writes. She adds, “A freshly baked cake and this photography produce in me a sense of admiration for people who can do tasks which require skills that are no longer routinely imparted in our society.”
It’s hard to detect detail in many of the slightly blurred photographs, but that doesn’t detract from their purpose. Together with the recipes and narrative, they create intimacy, bringing us close to the people sharing an ordinary moment with the camera lens. These are old photos Ferrario collected from flea markets and antique shops. The recipes – family recipes from Ferrario’s Italian childhood – include pasta alla carbonara, cantaloupe with prosciutto, waffles, minestrone, perfect steak, sugar cookies, strange rice and others.
You can read the book’s introduction on Ferrario’s website in PDF format. Published by Ferrario, the book is available for purchase on the site, or you could contact Spoonbill & Sugartown Booksellers. 19 Pictures, 22 Recipes is edited by poet Daisy Fried and designed by Ken Botnick at emdash studio in Saint Louis, Missouri.
