I Want to Show You More: Jamie Quatro

"Sharp-edged and fearless, mixing white-hot yearning with daring humor, Jamie Quatro's publishing debut is a stunning and subversive portrait of modern infidelity, faith, and family.

"Set around Lookout Mountain on the border of Georgia and Tennessee, Quatro's seamless weave of hypnotic stories range from the traditional to the fabulist as they reveal lives torn between spirituality and sexuality in the new American South.  These fifteen linked tales present readers with dark theological complexities, fractured marriages, and mercurial temptations.  Throughout the collection, a mother in her late thirties relates the various stages of her extramarital affair while she and others lay bare their notions of God, sex, raising children, and running:  a wife comes home with her husband to find her lover's corpse in their bed; a girl's embarrassment over attending a pool party with her quadriplegic mother turns to fierce devotion under the gaze of other guests; and a husband asks his wife to show him how she would make love to another man.

"Sultry, acute, startlingly intimate, and enticingly cool, I Want to Show You More marks the thrilling debut of an exhilarating new voice in American fiction."

It just so happens that I wrote a book review for this collection of short stories for my "Writing Fiction:  Unlikable Characters" class:

Will Gladly Accept “More” from Quatro

            Jamie Quatro’s collection of short stories in “I Want to Show You More” have the noteworthy ability to draw readers in with their personal, intimate tones; their often dark and extremely human characters and situations; and her enthralling sense of place.  Most unique, perhaps, is Quatro’s ability to subtly weave together her characters and individual stories in the collection.  One can read each story individually and lose no enjoyment, but a new level is achieved when reading it as a collection.  The reader recognize names and places from previous stories and makes fascinating connections that only add a new layer to the book as a whole.  A great deal of the stories deal with death—often as a result of cancer, questioning one’s religion, issues with fidelity, running (rather, the themes of dedication, perseverance, and struggle associated with the activity) and life in and around Lookout Mountain, Georgia/Tennessee—a place that seems to personify the tumultuous state of its residence, who, as portrayed in the story, are in constant states of flux and identity struggles.

            Refreshingly, Quatro is unafraid to discuss often taboo subjects like adultery, which she did in “Decomposition:  A Primer for Promiscuous Housewives,” where the main character’s affair with another man produces a metaphorical corpse—a grotesquely descriptive manifestation of the emotions resulting from the relationship—around which she and her husband must learn to live their lives.  As the body decays, she has to learn to cope with life after the affair—the decomposition cleverly mirrors the “stages of grief” taught in every Introduction to Psychology course.  This story itself is uniquely structured.  Quatro creates a clinical tone to the story through her use of medical terms for the actual physical decomposition of the corpse (i.e. the section titled, “Algor Mortis:  early postmortem stage in which the body gradually loses heat to the ambient environment,” is used to personify the initial break off of the affair (Quatro 5)), which balances out the often stomach-churning descriptions and prevents them from trending toward gratuitous.  Most readers can only take so many descriptions of “viscous black fluid ooz[ing] from the corner of the [corpse’s] mouth” (13). 

Similarly taboo, “Georgia the Whole Time” deals with the issue of living with a cancer diagnosis in another clever parallel.  The main character and her family move to Lookout Mountain, Georgia for her husband’s job, but the location quickly becomes a benefit for her cancer treatments.  As she is forced to get used to the oddities of the town—how people reorganize the rooms in their homes to have cheaper taxes thanks to the state line that runs through the town, the leash laws, the way there seems to be a constant undercurrent of battle (the resonating echoes from the Civil War)—Quatro uses these as an interesting medium to convey the character’s struggle to cope and regain her footing after her diagnosis in a very non-cliché and unexpected manner.

“Here” is the sequel to “Georgia the Whole Time”—told from the husband’s point of view—even though it is located first in the book.  It deals similarly with cancer, but with the wake it leaves in the aftermath of death.  Quatro bluntly—yet rather eloquently—approaches the grief and struggles of a man who lost his wife and watched her waste away.  He has to rediscover his role now that he is left alone to care for their children.  When he finally realizes that his children need him (because he is a self-professed “needy one” (51)) Neil allows himself to realize how he should have been cherishing his time with them and fully realized his place in their lives—his identity.

A similar rediscovery of one’s self takes place in “Better to Lose an Eye,” where a young girl tries to cope with her warring emotions concerning her quadriplegic mother.  Quatro’s way of handling complex, confusing inner conflict is moving and relatable.  It brings her characters to life in a short span of writing.  It takes Lindsey most of the story to realize that she does, indeed, love her helpless mother, but when she does, the scene is supremely touching.  Quatro writes, “She loved her, loved her desperately; she would sit with her, facing her, her back to the party, to the world.  She would hold Mama’s crumpled hands, she would kiss them, she didn’t care who saw.  They would sit together, the two of them, with only the blue sky and clouds drifting overhead.  They would sit there until God had mercy and turned them both to stone” (118).

Quatro’s approach to these stories—these characters who live in this unique town straddling the Tennessee-Georgia line—is captivating.  Personally, I have never read any other author to whom I can compare her writing.  Several of the stories were told in a similar tone and perspective to Lorrie Moore’s “How to Be the Other Woman” in the sense that they really draw the reader in through use of a particular perspective—the use of “you” helps the reader to put him- or herself into the life of the main character.  “Decomposition” contains this perspective as well as the issue of adultery, while “Ladies and Gentlemen of the Pavement” sucks the reader into a twisted world where running—struggling through life with unfair burdens—takes on a whole new meaning.

However, a couple of the stories seemed lumped in simply because they take place in the Lookout Mountain, Georgia/Tennessee area.  Even though I found “Ladies and Gentlemen of the Pavement” to be extremely complex and interesting, its oddities did not quite seem to fit with the rest of the collection.  The only strings tying it with the other stories were the theme of running and the setting.  Something similar happened with “1.7 to Tennessee.”  The story—about a determined elderly woman on a mission—was only really connected to the others by (again) the setting, and a very brief mention of some characters that are in a few of the other passages.  The tenuous connections here mess with the flow of the work as a whole, though they make interesting individual works.

Overall, Quatro’s collection was captivating.  The tales were beautifully tragic in their oft-sad plots, and the settings were rich and enhanced every aspect of her stories.

I suppose I cheated on this review by having one already prepared...  I would like to add (in my own "normal" review voice as opposed to my "scholarly" one) that I did enjoy the collection for the most part.  Some of the stories seemed a bit too "out there" and contrasted too sharply to the harsh, unadulterated reality of the rest of the stories.  My favorite aspect was probably the fact that the stories worked both as a whole and as individual pieces -- a mark of, I feel, brilliant talent.  Quatro's characters were rich and fascinating.  I loved how unafraid she was to address things that many authors stay away from.  She wasn't afraid to write about adulterous women and needy men and people who find themselves in periods of questioning their beliefs.  She had many characters that could be deemed "unlikable," but what makes them so fascinating is the fact that, even though they are supremely flawed by things like moral standards, we readers cannot help but find things in them that are captivating.  It's difficult to not want to read more.

I recommend this collection of short stories to those readers who are not afraid to test boundaries, think outside of the box, and look for a meaning deeper than the words they are reading.

Yes, Chef: A Memoir: Marcus Samuelsson

"It begins with a simple ritual:  Every Saturday afternoon, a boy who loves to cook walks to his grandmother's house and helps her prepare a roast chicken for dinner.  The grandmother is Swedish, a retired domestic.  The boy is Ethiopian and adopted, and he will grow up to become the world-renowned chef Marcus Samuelsson.  The book is his love letter to food and family in all its manifestations.

"Marcus Samuelsson was only three years old when he, his mother, and his sister--all battling tuberculosis--walked seventy-five miles to a hospital in the Ethiopian capital city of Addis Adaba.  Tragically, his mother succumbed to the disease shortly after she arrived, but Marcus and his sister recovered, and one year later they were welcomed into a loving middle-class white family in Goteborg, Sweden.  It was there that Marcus's new grandmother, Helga, sparked in him a lifelong passion for food and cooking with her pan-fried Herring, her freshly baked bread, and her signature roast chicken.  from a very early age, there was little question what Marcus was going to be when he grew up.

"Yes, Chef chronicles Marcus Samuelsson's remarkable journey from Helga's humble kitchen to some of the most demanding and cutthroat restaurants in Switzerland and France, from his grueling stints on cruise ships to his arrival in New York City, where his outsize talent and ambition finally came together at Aquavit, earning him a coveted New York Times three-star rating at the age of twenty-four.  But Samuelsson's career of 'chasing flavors,' as he calls it, had only just begun--in the intervening years, there have been White House state dinners, career crises, reality show triumphs and, most important, the opening of the beloved Red Rooster in Harlem.  At Red Rooster, Samuelsson has fulfilled his dream of creating a truly diverse, multiracial dining room--a place where presidents and prime ministers rub elbows with jazz musicians, aspiring artists, bus drivers, and nurses.  It is a place where an orphan from Ethiopia, raised in Sweden, living in America, can feel at home.

"With disarming honesty and intimacy, Samuelsson also opens up about his failures--the price of ambition, in human terms--and recounts his emotional journey, as a grown man, to meet the father he never knew.  Yes, Chef is a tale of personal discovery, unshakable determination, and the passionate, playful pursuit of flavors--one man's struggle to find a place for himself in the kitchen, and in the world."

Here's another one we read for my "Topics in Literature:  Food" course this past semester; however, this was one that I really enjoyed.  I cannot say enough about how Marcus Samuelsson's love for food absolutely permeated every letter in this book.  His passion was exciting and his story was supremely interesting.  We spent a few weeks discussing this story and I think I touched on some really good points so -- in lieu of a simple review -- I'd like to share some of my comments with you.

It seems like -- even when he did not realize it when he was younger -- food was at the heart of pretty much everything he did.  Even from very early on one of his favorite places to be was in the kitchen with Mormor, his mother's mother.  He demonstrated a drive and passion for it even when he was a boy.  On a fishing trip with his father, Marcus took great pride in being handed the task of preparing the meal:  "'Marcus, if you don't cook, we don't eat,' my father joked.  It was a joke, of course, because my father knew I needed no prompting to cook, which is probably why he let me take over the meal.  This was my first time cooking on my own, as opposed to helping my grandmother or mother.  Just as I had with the boats, I was eager to show I was a big man, that I didn't need anyone's help" (Samuelsson 33).  This was when Marcus was only twelve-years-old; he was already showing the desire to prove himself that would carry him throughout his career.  A few years after this fishing trip, he enrolled in cooking school.  He grew bored with the classes, but, instead of giving up, he found ways to challenge himself.  "To keep myself sharp," writes Samuelsson, "I turned each exercise into a little contest.  Could I fill the pastry shell faster than any of my classmates?  Could I wash and chop that dill faster than the teacher?  Could I finish each squirt of whipped cream with the exact same curl?" (59).  His whole world turned into this sort of competition revolving around food, which, I feel, is the biggest reason that he has had so much success in his career.  He never gave up, never got discourage, approached every task with everything he had, and did not settle for simply being talented -- he strove to be innovative and unique.

I feel like Marcus would not have made it to where he is today without such dedication to the kitchen.  It seems that most of the good things (outside of his family) happen to him in relation to the kitchen or food.  The kitchen is and always has been his realm.  Even when he thought soccer would be his life, he had been there in the kitchen with his grandmother, learning from her and carrying that gift with him always.  The women in his life vary quite a bit in their roles in his life, but each, in her own way, helps support his determination and goals.  His mother never told him he could not do something.  His sisters, Anna and Linda, got him something very special for his seventeenth birthday.  "It was a brand-new cook's knife with an eight-inch-long carbon steel blade.  This was the multipurpose knife every chef needs, with a blade thin enough to chop herbs, but a wide flat surface for crushing or picking up food.  Better still, it was the Rolls-Royce of knives, brand-wise, made by the French company Sabatier" (64).  ***Slight spoiler alert***  Even Brigitta, the woman Marcus sleeps with while on an outting with friends, helps him by telling him she expected nothing even though she was pregnant with his child.  Marcus, under the guidance of his parents, ended up sending money to Brigitta and their child, but she never pressured him into marriage or claiming the child as his own, thus allowing him to pursue his career.  ***End spoiler***

The women in his life played a huge role on his path to becoming a master chef.  They each provided him with unwaivering support in their own ways.  I believe the person who did this the most was his grandmother.  This is clearly evidenced in chapter three, titled "Swedish Fish."  Samuelsson writes, "My love for food did not come from my mother," which begs the question of where, exactly, he got his passion (15).  Shortly after this, Samuelsson describes Saturday dinners at his grandmother's home, and the answer is clear.  "I loved Saturdays as a kid...Saturdays meant the best meal we would have all week because dinner was almost always at my grandparents' house...[Grandmother] would pull out a stool and set me to string rhubarb or shell peas or pluck a chicken.  I'm not sure why mu sisters never joined us in our Saturday cooking sessions; and, at the time, I didn't care.  I was only too happy to have Mormor to myself" (23).  This close bond was what helped spark and nurture the love for food and cooking that brought Marcus his later success.  Who knows how different his career might have been -- where he might have ended up -- if Mormor had not been there to do so.

In addition, how actively Samuelsson sought out inspiration was a pleasant surprise.  He made sure to go ashore every chance he got during his stint on the cruise ship.  He writes, "New flavors were what I was after, and in almost every port of call, I smelled or tasted something I'd never tasted before.  I'd have four hours to go ashore, and I'd go by myself unless Paul or Susan wanted to taf along...Under the protective layer of my skin, I went unnoticed, which allowed me to observe and relish the most beautiful aspect of port culture:  the street food" (158). 

There was a very interesting correlation between the military and a kitchen in my reading of this book and my experiences with "chef shows" that have become so popular, but I was still struck by the hierarchy of the kitchens in which Marcus Samuelsson worked in throughout Yes, Chef.  The strict schedule, precision, and respect for superiors was remarkable.  To me, it was also like life on a ship, with the head chef as the captain and various tiers below him each doing his own assigned task.  The common thread is the enforcement of a strict hierarchy in one way or another.  Another extreme in the kitchen is the passion.  Samuelsson never waivers in his dedication to his cooking.  He is always trying to experiment and better himself through his cooking.  He devotes his life to it.  "I was interested in chasing flavors," writes Samuelsson, "I wanted to shake things up and see what happened.  What if I took this piece of turbot, put Parmesan on top, put it in the salamander to speed-melt the cheese, then finished it with an orange chutney?  I didn't know if mixing French fish, Italian cheese, and Indian Caribbean flavors would be food, but I wanted to try it" (157).  And try he did.  These were the experiments he kept in his journal and helped him to become the chef he did.  It was all about his passion to try new things, and his dedication to the craft.

Hopefully that didn't come off too wordy (or disjointed, since I mashed together several of my responses here).  Overall, the story was wonderful and it really made me appreciate the life of a chef and admire Samuelsson for his own, individual struggles.  His life is certainly unique and interesting!

I knew I'd seen Samuelsson's face somewhere before, but it wasn't until I read the story (and subsequently mentioned his name to my mother) that I realized we'd seen him on Top Chef.  My mother was adamant that Samuelsson was a "know-it-all jerk," but I don't remember having that impression years ago when he'd competed.  I'm kind of glad that I don't have such a vivid memory of his time on the show because I was completely able to enjoy his story without any preconceived notions about who he was as a person.  I will admit that I feel like he gave up some things he should not have for his career, but I am not one to judge--I'm not someone who believes in criticizing when I have no idea what the situation was really like to live through.  A couple of the passages geared toward pretentious, but not to the point where I didn't enjoy the read.  As a huge Gordon Ramsay fan, I had a difficult time stomaching Samuelsson's comments about his fellow chef (though I am not disillusioned enough to think Ramsay is a teddy bear).  Samuelsson tried to claim he wasn't bashing Ramsay, but I felt like it was a weak attempt not to do so (and I say that from the most objective way possible).

Overall, I highly recommend this story for anyone who wants an interesting memoir to read; anyone who loves cooking or wants an insight into life inside a kitchen; or someone who's simply interesting in reading about the background of a celebrity chef.  This book has a bit of something for so many readers out there and I feel like so many people will enjoy it just as I did.

Samuelsson, Marcus. Yes, Chef: A Memoir. New York: Random House, 2012. Print.

Like Water for Chocolate: Laura Esquivel

"To the table or to bed
"You must come when you are bid

"The number-one bestseller in Mexico in 1990, Like Water for Chocolate is a romantic, poignant tale, touched with bittersweet moments of magic and sensuality.  Evocative of How to Make an American Quilt in structure, Tampopo in its celebration of food, and Heartburn in its irony and wit, it is a lively and funny tale of family life in turn-of-the-century Mexico.

"The narrator's great-aunt Tita is the youngest of three daughters born to Mama Elena, the tyrannical owner of the De la Garza ranch.  While still in her mother's womb, she wept so violently -- as her mother chopped onions -- that she caused Mama Elena to begin early labor; and Tita slipped out in the middle of the kitchen table, amid the spices and fixings for noodle soup.  This early encounter with food soon became a way of life, and Tita grew up to be a master chef.  Each chapter of the novel begins with one of Tita's recipes and her careful instructions for preparation.

"In well-born Mexican families, tradition dictates that the youngest daughter not marry, but remain at home to care for her mother.  Even though Tita has fallen in love, Mama Elena chooses not to make an exception, and instead, arranges for Tita's older sister to marry Tita's young man.

"In order to punish Tita for her willfulness, Mama Elena forces her to bake the wedding cake.  The bitter tears Tita weeps while stirring the batter provoke a remarkable reaction among the guests who eat the cake.  It is then that it first becomes apparent that her culinary talents are unique.

"Laura Esquivel's voice is direct, simple, and compelling.  She has written a fresh and innovative novel, bringing her own inimitable strengths to a classic love story."

I have no explanation for why I started a draft of this review months ago and never posted it.  In fact, I have several reviews that I still need to post and (rather unfortunately) never got around to them...  Now that I only have a few days left of "summer break" before my summer semester starts I've got to find a way to cram them all in and make a valiant effort to do them justice.  Finishing this post seems like as good a place as any to do so!

This book was assigned for my "Topics in Literature:  Food" course.  First, let me say that this was a brilliant course that really opened my eyes to a lot of issues in the way we, as a nation and as individual consumers, view food.  I'm pretty sure I touched on a couple of these in a previous post or two, so I won't rehash them here.  This particular book was one of the few that were intended to expose us to food as a form of self-expression, personal culture, as well as a broader culture.  The premise behind this story was touching--I'm a sucker for unrequited love and anything to do with food--but (and I know I'm going to have some disagreement on this) the way everything was presented was not very appealing to me.  If memory serves, this was a translated text originally written in Spanish, which makes me wonder if some of the beauty of the work was literally lost-in-translation.  My 5 years of Spanish urged me to sit down and try to mentally translate the text back into Spanish to see if it was anymore eloquent, but my efforts proved fruitless in this endeavor:  I didn't care anymore for the writing.  So many parts were too simplistic for a book I know has garnered much popularity and has been touted as a brilliant piece of literature.  Honestly, I think a great deal of my inability to enjoy the story has to do with the fact that some of the situations were just way too "out there" for me.  Chickens creating a whirlwind and Tita's sister stripping naked from a reaction to the emotion Tita had poured into the food were simply too "folktale-esque" for me to really enjoy.  They're not what I expected to encounter in the book and they are not something that, personally, I like to read.

I did, however, like the structure of the story (for the most part).  Breaking everything down by recipe was a clever way to bring readers back to the common undercurrent of food as a constant vessel through which the poor, oppressed Tita is able to communicate her emotions.  I understand the metaphor if coupling the chapters of the story with periods in Tita's life, but their typically-accepted parallels did not quite match up with the stages of Tita's growth--something else that bothered me.  I think leaving the recipes as the sole "labels" for the chapters would have been more than unique enough.

While I liked Tita's character (probably more for my sympathy for her than the fact that she had the potential to be a very strong character), I had a difficult time coming to terms with some of her decisions and actions.  For all her purity, Tita made some poor decisions--some too flawed for me to respect her.  I wonder how much of this story was pulled from reality and how much was contrived because there are some things (like Tita's choice in lover/spouse) that were obviously poor (no matter her emotions) and would have been weak authorial choices and could probably have only been explained away as "reality" (i.e. they were decisions influenced by real ones made by the person on whom this story is based--people are flawed, therefore, their decisions are sometimes flawed).

We were supposed to watch the film version of this story for our course, but I never got around to it.  I know--had I enjoyed the story more--I probably would have gone out of my way to procure a copy and carve out time from my busy schedule to watch it.  While a great deal of the descriptions of the food (the actual dishes, not the descriptions or instructions, because I felt like those sometimes disrupted the flow of the story) were wonderfully vivid and enticing, I had a hard time losing myself in the story because of the level of writing and some of the unbelievably fantastical elements of the tale.  I realize this story has some very passionate fans, but it was not my cup of tea.  I recommend it as a good example of how food can be such an incredibly emotional aspect of our lives and culture, but I have a hard time recommending it on literary merits.  It was a fairly quick read though and I am sure there are those out there who would love such a story.