Tales of food and family feelings
THE DEVIL’S LARDER***
by Jim Crace
Penguin, 2002
In The Devil’s Larder, Jim Crace spins 64 tales around the theme of food. Ranging in length from a single paragraph to a few pages, these are not short stories so much as vignettes, tiny slices of narrative. Yet many are packed with the force of a super-condensed novel, redolent with hidden meanings, stretching into the past and future, calling up whole unwritten chapters with a single phrase. Crace hands the reader the barest bones of story and character, leaving us just enough clues to add the flesh with our own imaginations.
While most of these stories take place in the present, or somewhere like it, they are curiously timeless, hanging suspended in their own parallel world. For although some of the stories are rooted in mundane, everyday life, many push the limits of belief or fly off into the realms of magic realism, myth and dark worlds adjacent to our own. Unlikely restaurants spring up, foods have mysterious effects or take on lives of their own.
Many of Crace’s characters are outsiders: loners, grandmothers missing their children, divorcees. There are dinner parties and restaurants here, but they bring little warmth of human contact. Crace is a dark writer, but it is curious in a book about food to find it so rarely at the center of social interaction. Family meals and candlelit dinners do not feature in his world of food.
While the unusual structure of this book gives Crace the opportunity to show off the depths of his imagination, and his versatility as a writer, it also reveals his limitations. Progressing through 64 stories, one finds that themes recur, and one story can start to feel like another. More tellingly, the rhythm and patterns of Crace’s cool, brittle writing are exposed through so many tautly wound beginnings, middles and ends. You start to recognize the author's voice in his numerous narrators. He is laying himself bare as a writer, open to the scrutiny of accumulation and comparison. It is a brave, bravura enterprise, that could be pulled off only by a writer of Jim Crace's stature.
If you have enjoyed Crace’s previous outings, you will lap up the contents of The Devil’s Larder, but this is not a dish for everyone’s palate.
SISTER CRAZY***
by Emma Richler
Flamingo, 2002
Jemima Weiss has the kind of family you always wanted to be part of. She suspects her mother of being an angel, or possibly a good witch. Her father would make a great cowboy, though he is actually a rumpled sports writer. Her four siblings are quirky, fun and caring. In fact, Jem's family is so wonderful, so normal, that it leaves her a mental wreck.
Emma Richler's warm, funny novel intersperses Jem's idyllic childhood with flashes of her depressive adulthood, in which she is trying to come to terms with mental illness. Richler takes us into the heart of childhood, through Jem's vivid descriptions of elaborate Action Man games and sibling hi-jinks. We fall in love with her little sister Harriet, pirouetting through the house, her mother's all-healing smile, her laconic brother Jude, just 15 months older than her, and "barely a separate person from me." But as Jem's brothers grow older and start going on dates, Jem feels set adrift, uncomprehending that they are embarking on lives that do not involve her. Jem is so much in love with her family that she can't quite work out how to form relationships with anyone else. Richler's novel delights and discomfits by turn, as we try to reconcile the sappy, charming child with the tragically disoriented and disturbed adult she becomes.
It is Jem's narrative voice that really makes this novel. She is a wonderful character, and Richler perfectly hits the subtle gradations of tone of Jem at 8 or 12, 15 or 35. Richler's depth of observation is masked by her light, easy prose and Jem's breezy naivety. Jem gives us her musings, not only on the members of her family, but also on topics as diverse as movies, knights of the round table and single malt whisky. She brings a fascinated spirit of enquiry to the world around her, coming to some very funny conclusions. There is a touch of Catcher in the Rye's Holden Caulfield in Jem's casual, frank, snappy sentences; her wry, almost unintentional humor; her desperate affection for her siblings; and her confusion about how the wider world operates. Richler is hardly J. D. Salinger, but this is an impressive debut, and a delightfully engaging novel of childhood, barbed with the unexpectedly bitter fruits of happiness.
