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Telling Room, The: A Tale Of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, And The World's Greatest Piece Of Cheese (2013)

by Michael Paterniti(Favorite Author)

3.28 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

1480541265 (ISBN13: 9781480541269)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Brilliance Audio

review 1: The Telling Room is an interesting narrative non-fiction tale of an obsession shared. The author, Michael Paterniti, becomes fascinated with an artisan cheese from Spain and tracks down the original maker of it, a man named Ambrosio. Ambrosio is larger than life and a force of nature, reminiscent of Zorba the Greek. The two develop a bit of a bromance and the idea for a book about the cheese is put forth and approved. Ambrosio is a born story-teller who slowly reveals the origins of the cheese, the idea to sell it internationally and how that ambition came to be the ruination of Ambrosio's best friendship. The author is enraptured to the point of moving his family to Spain for 8 months to really delve into the culture and lifestyle needed to fully understand the heroic hig... morehs and tragic depths of Ambrosio's story. The book starts well but quickly gets a bit bogged down with lengthy footnotes, tangents and the author's love of adjectives and similes. Once the reader gets past that hurdle, the second act settles down and begins to really enchant. The primary, almost mythical story of the cheese and its affect on Ambrosio, his family, friends and community is engaging and especially interesting to anyone who has ever spent time exploring the culture of Castilian Spain. The third act sees the author struggling to finish the book once he realizes that his focus on Ambrosio ignores the other, more mundane, sides of the story necessary to flesh out the whole saga. When truths contradict the legend, how do you present the story in a way that is fair to both?This book could have been a rather pedestrian tale of how not to let dreams and ambition ruin an already good thing. By becoming part of the story, Michael Paterniti elevates it to a literary level deserving of praise and recommendation.
review 2: This is not "a tale of love, betrayal, revenge, and the world's greatest piece of cheese." It is "the true story of a guy who wanted to tell a tale about love, betrayal, revenge, and the world's greatest piece of cheese but the story was too big for him and he let it get the best of him." For most of the book, I thought it was a novel--at times it's certainly written like one, Michael slipping into Ambrosio's point of view to tell that amazing tale he never quite tackles--and wasn't quite sure what the book was about (too much going on to have a focus) or where it was headed (whether it was about Ambrosio or Paterniti) or how all the jumbled, rambling pieces and all those footnotes (oh my the endless footnotes) fit into a cohesive book. The only reason I persevered was because we had a new girl coming to book club and I didn't want to be the slacker who didn't finish the book, but most everyone else ended up skimming it. A little bit I held on for that promised story/conclusion we are never delivered and a hope that it tied together in the end in an amazing way I couldn't foretell, which it doesn't, but my little bit of curiosity wasn't enough to keep me interested.The few pages in the book dedicated to Ambrosio's story were interesting, but Paterniti delivers the heart of the story in a quick recap and then spends the rest of the novel explaining why he couldn't tell that story. It's clear Ambrosio is a larger-than-life person with a talent for oral storytelling, but oral storytelling is a very different art than written storytelling and Paterniti couldn't translate the oral story into a written one. Novel (and even memoir) writing is also a different art than the magazine article writing Paterniti is accustomed to and the style does not lend itself to a longer piece. There is no development, no overarching growth and story, no showing instead of telling, just a lot of Paterniti telling us Ambrosio and his story and culture are amazing and he is going to tell us this amazing story to make us fall in love with Ambrosio and old Castile too but he is too afraid of betraying Ambrosio to research his story. The one place that his journalism background should have helped him, tracking down sources and researching the story's authenticity, are where the story fail most.I never quite understood why Paterniti was so enthralled by Ambrosio. Ya, ya the simple life, but he seemed so full of himself to the point of dishonesty and detriment to his family and his life. I never got why his story was so worthy of telling. There is a story in there that could have possibly been good, but I think Paterniti became too close to the story to tell it. He couldn't see the forest for the trees, all those drafts and notes and footnotes (meant to immerse us in Spanish history that end up bogging it down) didn't organize into a cohesive story/memoir/I'm not sure what. It's okay if Paterniti keeps telling us all his early drafts didn't work out if this final draft was amazing and it was about the a-ha moment when he finally found the missing piece(s), but this is a book about his failure, not how he fixed it. Because he's incapable of telling the story or even extricating himself from it, the book is more about his analysis of the story he couldn't tell than the story. I don't want to read a story through an author's eyes anymore than I have to--I want to interpret the story through my own experiences--unless the story is about the author and what he gained from the story (if he becomes the main character, not the character of his story), but that isn't pulled together either. Discussing this at book club last night, I realized Paterniti is the same as Ambrosio in a way he doesn't realize. He got in over his head and was in so much debt (having to pay back a book advance for a book he couldn't write) that he turned on his friend (publishing a book that shines an unfavorable light on him) to extricate himself from a poor situation. If it weren't for that book advance, I doubt (from his comments not my assumptions) Paterniti would have turned in this mess of notes and thoughts and footnotes and way too much rambling about himself or that his publisher would have published it. My biggest complaint about the book is that it is organizationally a mess and it's never pulled together, but with all the money already invested in it, good enough had to be enough. less

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