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L'inconfondibile Tristezza Della Torta Al Limone (2010)

by Aimee Bender(Favorite Author)

3.15 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

8875213623 (ISBN13: 9788875213626)

languge

English

genre

Food & Cookbooks

publisher

Minimum Fax

review 1: Anyone who says this book went nowhere either didn't finish reading it, wasn't paying attention, or didn't have enough imagination to suspend disbelief. I am surprised by the bad reviews. In Bender's "The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake," there was more honesty about human nature and relationships than I have seen in a novel in a while. Taking honesty to its logical conclusion when it comes to family relationships can and will lead us to some disturbing and surreal places if we let it, and this book did not disappoint in that regard. Fans of magic realist fiction will like this one where "Like Water for Chocolate" meets Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" meets the surrealist paintings of Renee Magritte. While the idea of someone's emotions going into her cooking is not new ... more(Like Water for Chocolate), Aimee Bender takes that idea and runs in a different direction with it. Here, protagonist Rose Edelstein can read the emotions of the person who prepared her food. She becomes aware of her "gift" on her 9th birthday, when her mother bakes her a lemon birthday cake--a heavy responsibility for someone so young, especially when her mother's emptiness and sadness transferred through the cake is so completely at odds with her happy-go-lucky public persona. This is quite a heavy burden for a 9 year-old girl. At first I didn't think I would enjoy a book delivered by a 9 year old narrator, but keep reading. Rose learns and grows, and the plot thickens. This book won't take you to the exotic places you might jet off to in other magic realist works like Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude" or Isabel Allende's "The House of the Spirits." I think that's another reason magic realist fans lose patience all too soon with this book, but I'm glad I didn't. It takes place in suburban, middle-class, Los Angeles in the Edelstein home, and they appear to be an ordinary nuclear family, but that is so very far from the truth. This book raises questions about what it means to be "normal," and whether that's even possible; it's about the immense personal cost of trying to conform when you have an unusual gift to share with the world; it's about true alienation, even and especially, when in a room with family, and about trying to find a place in the world when our gifts may not be understood or appreciated by others or even ourselves.
review 2: Strange book: a father, son, and daughter all have strange powers. The father ignores his power as he saw what smelling people's emotions did to his father (he refused to enter hospitals because he sensed he had some strange power which he chose not to use - at all). The son "disappears" for periods of time as he "becomes" chairs or beds or other pieces of furniture. The daughter and main character is able to taste people's feelings in their food. The wife/mother is oblivious to all of them, wrapped up in her new vocation, woodworking, and her new lover, a co-worker. less

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