The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine by Alina Bronsky

The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine by Alina Bronsky
304 pages
Published April 2011 by Europa Editions
Source: the publisher

When 17-year-old Sulfia Kalganowa tells her mother that she's pregnant and doesn't know who the father is, her mother, Rosa, doesn't jump to the usual conclusion that her daughter has been sleeping around. Instead, Rosa believes that Sulfia must have gotten pregnant by looking at a man. Is Rosa stupid? Not at all, Rosa just has such a low opinion of her daughter that doesn't think any man would have her. Even if her daughter happens to be a medical miracle, Rosa isn't going to allow her daughter to have this baby and bring shame to her own good name. Despite her best efforts, however, some months later, Aminat is born and Rosa is smitten, despite the child's tendency to cry all of the time. The little girl looks just like Rosa, after all, and isn't that a fortunate thing?

Beginning in 1978 Russia and for the next thirty years, Rosa will spend all of her time and energy "helping" Sulfia find a suitable husband, raising Aminat in the right way (something Sulfia clearly isn't capable of doing), and making sure she gets everything she deserves out of her own life.

Those of you who have read "Olive Kitteridge" will cringe when I tell you that Rosa Achemetowna makes Olive look like the mother of the year. She is, perhaps the most egotistical character ever brought to life on the page and one of the most conniving.

"I think it pleased Sergej to have such a graceful swan like me as his mother-in-law, especially given that he had married such an ugly duckling."

Far from finding Rosa so disagreeable that I didn't want to read another word about her, Bronsky pulled me into Rosa's world. Even after Rosa essentially sells her daughter to a pedophile, I still could not bring myself to hate her. In fact, by the end of the book, I even began to feel sorry for this woman who was so wrapped up in her own view of the world, that she couldn't see what was really happening around her, couldn't really see the people around her for who they were.

Bronsky's writing is crisp, yet detailed and she writes with a wit that makes a character like Rosa someone the reader will care about. I accepted this book as part of my continuing effort to widen my view of the world and I was not disappointed. Bronsky shows the reader what life was like in Russia in the 1980's and 90's for the average citizen and what it felt like for those who finally decided they needed to find another life for themselves in another country. Although the title of this book may give the impression that the book is a light read, Bronsky pulls together a number of serious themes, making it an excellent choice for book clubs.

Sunday Salon - August 28

What a great weekend we've had here! Went out with friends Friday night and had friends and family in for a dinner party last night. Today we're off to my parents for another dinner party. As much fun as I've had, that's about enough socializing for this bookworm! I haven't gotten any reading done at all this weekend but I'm going to make good use of the car trip today for just that purpose. The Big Guy and Mini-Him have been working on my computer this weekend and have yet to get my pictures loaded back on, hence no Sunday Salon image. There may also be glitches I'm unaware of as of yet. Please let me know if you notice anything off or not working when you visit!

I came across this book in an email from Random House.  Without knowing anything at all about the story, I'm anticipating Hooked by Catherine Greenman will be making waves amongst the parents of its intended audience. People who prefer their children not to read anything that smacks of the real world and almost certainly not going to want them to even pick up a book with a pregnant teen on the cover.

The Atlantic had an article this week, "Can A Bestselling Book Guarantee A Hit Movie?" The conclusion, after looking at two of the most recent movie adaptations, Kathryn Stockett's The Help and David Nicholl's One Day, is a resounding "no." The movie still needs to be good, it's as simple as that. Of course, if your protagonist is Harry Potter, then question is moot; the movie will be huge. And the latest Winnie-the-Pooh movie is also something of an exception to the rule. It has not done well at all at the theaters; shame on parents of young children for not making this one a hit. It's so hard to get Hollywood to make movies for children that are good. Hopefully the sales and rentals of the DVD version will be big enough to convince movie makers that a profit can be made with movies aimed at children.

Last night my sister was raving about a book she recently read, A Dog's Purpose, which will appear later this week when "Mama Shepp's Family Recommends.." returns. Also up this week, reviews of The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine by Alina Bronsky and Skipping A Beat by Sarah Pekkanen both of which I thoroughly enjoyed. This week I'm reading Joan Leegant's Wherever You Go" for an upcoming TLC Book Tour. What are you reading this week?

Fairy Tale Fridays - The Dessert Version

Once again, my plans for Fairy Tale Fridays were changed this week. I've been doing some reading of The Power of Myth but I was completely distracted when I was changing channels the other night and came across Bravo-TV's Top Chef: Just Desserts. And just what was the theme this week, my little pretties? You've got it--fairy tales!  There are some great pictures on their site, which sadly would not allow me to save them, even though they say, big as day, that they belong to Bravo TV. Each of the teams had to make a centerpiece that showed what fairy tale inspired their desserts. For Goldilocks and The Three Bears, for example, one of the desserts was Baby Bear's Porridge, Hot Ranier Cherries, Basil Syrup and Cherry Sorbet. Who'd have guessed you could eat your fairy tales?!

Cocktail Hour Under The Tree of Forgetfulness by Alexandra Fuller

Cocktail Hour Under The Tree of Forgetfulness  by Alexandra Fuller
256 pages
Published August 2011 by Penguin Group
Source: the publisher & TLC Book Tours

How to summarize Cocktail Hour Under The Tree of Forgetfulness? It is, at it's heart, the story of Alexandra Fuller's mother, Nicola who was born on the Scottish Isle of Skye but spent nearly all of her life in Africa. She certainly is the central character around whom all others orbit and a woman who lived her life so that she would have a biography worth telling. But Africa itself is the star of this book as Fuller chronicles her family's lives through a period when the entire continent was changing profoundly.

In Cocktail Hour Under The Tree of Forgetfulness, Fuller has spent hours interviewing her parents, primarily on vacation in South Africa where they spend hours literally having cocktails under the Tree of Forgetfulness. Ironic, isn't it, that nothing is forgotten under that tree?

Nicola's childhood was both typically British (stiff upper lip, loyalty to blood, that kind of thing) and utterly unusual.

"I used to run away from our bungalow, which was on the edge of the estate, and go over to the main house and play in her [their landlord's] garden with my first best friend, Stephen Foster." Mum smiles at the memory. "Stephen and I used to take turns pushing each other on his tricycle. We wore matching romper suits. We had tea parties. We went everywhere together, hand in hand."
"Stephen was Zoe's son?" I guess.
Mum frowns. "No, no, no," she says. "Stephan wasn't her son. Stephan was her chimpanzee."
There is a small, appalled pause while I try - and fail - to imagine sending one of my toddlers off to play with a chimpanzee.
"Weren't your parents worried he would bite you?" I ask.
Mum give me a look as if I have just called Winnie the Pooh a pedophile, "Stephen? Bite me? Not at all, we were best friends. He was a very, very nice, very civilized chimpanzee. Anyway, my mother didn't worry about me too much. She knew I would always be all right because everywhere I went Topper came with me."
"And Topper was?"
"A dog my father rescued," Mum says."

That passage says so much about the way that Nicola was raised, the way that she raised her own children. No fenced yards or stranger danger for them and animals were, truly part of the family. Nicola and Fuller's father, Tim, met in Africa and only during a period of extreme poverty and sadness did they return to Britain. But there was something about the light of Africa, the air, the opportunity, that drew them back, even when it meant settling in Rhodesia at a time when that country had been cut off by Britain.

"We accepted the war as one of the prices that had to be paid for Our Freedom, although it was a funny sort of Freedom that didn't include being able to say what you wanted about the Rhodesian government or being able to write books that were critical of it. And for the majority of the country, Freedom did not include access to public restrooms, the sidewalks, the best schools and hospitals, decent farming land or the right to vote."

Do you know the line people mock about movies - "I laughed, I cried...?" That was this book for me. I read long passages of this book to my poor husband (why are those passages never as funny when you aren't actually reading the book?), laughing. Then there were places where my heart broke for the Fullers and other passages where I gasped in disbelief at the horrors of war. Fuller places her family squarely into the reality of Africa as native Africans begin fighting to take back their continent.

"War is Africa's perpetual ripe fruit. There is so much injustice to resolve, such desire for revenge in the blood of the people, such crippling corruption of power, such unseemly scramble for the natural resources. The wind of power shirts and there go the fruit again, tumbling toward the ground, each war more inventively terrible than the last."

I loved this book. Although it skipped around quite a bit and it could sometimes take a bit to settle yourself back into where you were at in time and how it related to what else you had read, I ultimately far preferred Fuller's style than if she had tried to tell the story of her family in a more linear way. I grew to understand, at least a bit, what it was about Africa, that drew Fuller's parents and grandparents back to the continent, even at great personal risk. And I fell in love with Nicola, a woman who, at first glance, would appear to be one of the most thoughtless mothers you've ever read about. Not cruel, really, just a product of her upbringing and life. But Fuller, herself, clearly loves her mother, a woman of whom she says "the broken, splendid, fierce mother I have."

Thanks to TLC Book Tours for including me on this tour! For other opinions about the book, check out the full tour for this book. To learn more about Fuller, check out her website, where you can also learn more about her first memoir, Don't Let's Go To The Dogs Tonight, a book Nicola forever after referred to as that Awful Book.

Sunday Salon - August 21

How can we possibly be nearly the end of August (and, therefore, the end of summer)? What a blur this summer has been! I feel like I haven't done much reading but I know by most people's standards, I've read quite a lot. I'd like to think that I'll get more read this fall. But those of you who know anything at all about me by now know that I'm going to spend quite a lot of the next few months in front of a television watching football. My beloved Cornhuskers will kick off their inaugural season in the Big 10 soon and every fall starts with high hopes for my Oakland Raiders. Perhaps I need to work in some football reading this fall.

We went to a wedding last night, the first of Mama Shepp's boys to get married. I can't believe my boys could possibly be grown up enough to be getting married although the youngest of them are all 22 by now, the same age I was when I got married. Still, all of "my boys" will forever be goofy high school kids, hanging out in my kitchen, forgetting that I'm a grownup and making me laugh so hard.

New York Press has a article about mom-and-pop bookstores this week. Much as I love knowing that I can walk into a Barnes & Noble and find almost any book I'm looking for, I love the idea of walking into an indie bookstore and finding a book I didn't even know I was looking for.

"There’s a word in Danish that doesn’t translate to English. Google Translate will tell you that “hygge” means “cozy” or “coziness,” but it really means much more than that. Hygge, pronounced “hue-gah,” is the happy, satisfied laziness you feel when it’s raining outside and you’re curled up on the couch. It’s the feeling of being at home—of being comfortable—that all humans crave.

Hygge is exactly the feeling you get in tiny bookshops that smell like paper and dust and feature leaning towers of good reads. And it’s the feeling on which the owners of those bookstores count to stay in business."

There's nothing but cleaning (and, of course, some reading) on my schedule this afternoon. It might just be a good day to head off to downtown Omaha and visit Jones Street Booksellers.

Happy 90th birthday to Winnie-The-Pooh today! He looks pretty good for 90, doesn't he?!

This week I'm finishing up "Cocktails Under The Tree of Forgetfulness" by Alexandra Fuller (loving this one!) and then I'm actually ahead of reading for my scheduled reviews. What to read next? What are you reading this week?