The Ingredients of Love by Nicolas Barreau
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I read this book in the week before I watched the movie Bareilly Ki Barfi. The movie is only loosely based on / inspired by the book, borrowing only the basic plot. Everything else is quite different, with the Parisian flavor being quite dominant in the book while the movie is charmingly Desi.
A young and beautiful Parisian restaurateur, Aurélie Bredin, in the daze of a recent heartbreak, wanders subs consciously into a small bookstore and buys a book, The Smiles of Women by an obscure author, Robert Miller. She reads the book obsessively in a single night because, as unbelievable as it seems, she realizes that the book is about her restaurant and about her. This stokes her curiosity and she believes she must meet the man who wrote the book and who, she believes, pulled her away when she was on the brink of depression. But it is easier said than done because all her efforts to meet the reclusive writer Robert Miller seem to be thwarted by his publisher Andre Chabanais. I won’t go into further details because it is an extremely predictable plot. But, it is a nicely written story ( mostly simple prose ) and if you, like me, are a sucker for things set in Paris, ( yes they are super clichéd
