(Welcome to my new, not-very-regular blog column Two Page Minimum, wherein I take a new book out to happy hour and give it a few minutes to grab my attention. Two Page Minimum is my judgment on that speed-dating experience.)
Who's your date today?
Lara Vapnyar's short story collection Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love.
Where'd you go?
Clinton Corner Cafe. Happy hour 4-7 pm daily, $1 off food menu, fifty cents off beer.
What'd you drink?
Hopworks Organic Velvet ESB.
What does your date say about itself?
The cream-colored cover with its image of heart-shaped broccoli screams tastefully suggests Foodie Lit. I feared eroticized food descriptions and bobo couples feeding one another gravlax and capers, but this was not the case. From the jacket:
...Each of these stories invites us into the uniquely captivating private worlds of Vapnyar's Eastern European emigres... Russian in its wit and in many of its rich details, but American in its insistence on the quest for personal happiness, however provisional and however high the cost...
Is there a representative quote?
From the first story,"Broccoli," about a lonely Russian woman with a crumbling marriage who seeks comfort in the produce aisle, buying vegetables she doesn't know how to cook only to allow them to rot in the fridge (symbolism alert!):
Her favorite book, Italian Cuisine: The Taste of the Sun, included step-by-step photographs of the cooking process. In the photos, smooth light-skinned female hands with evenly trimmed fingernails performed all the magical actions on the vegetables. They looked like Nina's hands, and Nina fantasized that they were hers. It was she, Nina, who made those perfect curled carrot slices. It was she who pushed the hard, stubborn stuffing into the bell peppers, or rinsed grit off lettuce leaves, or chopped broccoli florets, scattering tiny green crumbs all over the table. Nina's lips moved, forming the rich, passionate words of the cooking instructions: "Brush with olive oil," bring to a boil and simmer gentle," "serve hot," "scoop out the pulp," "chop," "slice," "crush," "squash."
Will you two end up in bed together?
Maybe on a slow night, but more likely I'd just go home to the cat. Vapnyar makes a great first impression--"Puffed Rice and Meatballs" opens with the line, "Once, in a hazy postcoital silence, Katya's lover came back from a shower, dropped the towel to the floor, climbed into bed, and said, "Tell me about your childhood. Tell me about the horrors of communism."--and she has a knack for conveying a character's complexity in just a few words or actions. The food/home/comfort relationship isn't particularly interesting or well-rendered, though, at least based on what I read, and even after two stories it already felt like a gimmick.
For further reading, here's a New York Times profile of the author.
