Bitter Greens by Kate Forsyth

Historical fiction about real women, and fairytale retellings: two kinds of books that are in my wheelhouse. Bitter Greens by Australian author Kate Forsyth is both. Yay! It's a retelling of Rapunzel, set in 16th-century Italy, and a richly-detailed fictional account of the life of Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de la Force, set in the French court of Louis XIV. Charlotte-Rose was the king's cousin, she was banished to a nunnery, and she is the author of the original Rapunzel/ Petrosinella story.

There are three central characters: Charlotte-Rose, Margherita (Rapunzel/ Petrosinella), and Silena (the witch). I listened to the audiobook [Blackstone: 19 hrs 26 min] and can still hear narrator Kate Reading's voice as the witch saying: "Petrosinella, Petrosinella, let down your hair, so I may climb the golden stair." 

There are parts that dragged a bit; sometimes from the weight of historical detail, a little too much about sexual dalliances, or too much dithering when I would have have preferred action. In a paper book, I can skim through stuff that doesn't interest me, but with audio it isn't so easy. Fortunately, I really like listening to Kate Reading's voice and her narration helps pull me through when I start to feel mired in a long story. 

I also came up against something else: my personal resistance to surrender. Readers filter narrative through our own experiences, so I always take note when I can feel resistance happening. It's an opportunity to learn about myself. In this case, when characters chose a submissive path, I was unhappy. It made me check whether this reaction had to do with the characters being true to themselves or my own stuff.

Hops shoots taste like
asparagus. Just eat the
tender top part.

Aside from the small things that I've mentioned, I enjoyed this book a lot and recommend it. As an element of total serendipity, I encountered bitter greens in three books within three weeks of each other. Grace Mccleen's The Land of Decoration features a religious zealot who believes bitter greens are a necessary part of his family's diet. I also read a whole book on the topic: Bitter by Jennifer McLagan. Another bit of serendipity: the old nun who befriends Charlotte-Rose is named Seraphina, and I happen to be rereading Seraphina by Rachel Hartman at the moment.

It's early spring in Edmonton, so my garden is supplying me with dandelion greens, young chicory leaves and hops shoots. Bring on the bitter!

Readalikes: The Moon and the Sun by Vonda McIntyre (for the court of the Sun King with a touch of fantastical elements); Zel by Donna Jo Napoli (another successful retelling of Rapunzel); and Wicked by Gregory Maguire (for the viewpoint of a misunderstood witch). Other great historical fiction/fairytale combinations include Tinder (Sally Gardner) and The Snow Child (Eowyn Ivey).

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

Right now, I have zero books on the go. (Hard to believe, but it's true.) Yesterday, I brought home the novel I had been reading on my breaks at work because I was so close to the end (My Brilliant Friend), I finished an audiobook (Wild Ones) and the novel I was reading at home (Euphoria). This morning, I even finished reading a cookbook that I have been dipping in and out of (The New Persian Kitchen). So, with a clean reading slate, I am determined to write about all four of these books before I start something new.

Having heard a lot about Elena Ferrante's series of Neapolitan novels, I was curious to see if they lived up to the hype. The short answer is yes. I was immediately swept up in the soap opera of the first book, My Brilliant Friend, translated by Ann Goldstein.

With its large cast of characters and strong sense of place and time, it's sort of a cross between Jane Smiley's Some Luck and Simonetta Agnello Hornby's The Almond Picker.

My Brilliant Friend spans a decade of friendship between two girls, starting in 1950 when they are about six years old. Lila is very smart and willful to the point of naughtiness--qualities that attract shy and cautious Lenu. I found the close character studies of the girls and the people around them surprisingly compelling, even though there isn't a lot that happens. The place and era--an impoverished neighbourhood of Naples with its undercurrent of violence--is vividly real.

Lenu is the first-person narrator throughout. I was reminded of Barbara Ehrenreich's memoir Living with a Wild God when Lenu describes something that Lila experiences:

   "On December 31st of 1958 Lila had her first episode of dissolving margins. The term isn't mine, she always used it. She said that on those occasions the outlines of people and things suddenly dissolved, disappeared."

The final scene, which takes place at 16-year-old Lila's wedding banquet, caught me by surprise. It's not exactly a cliffhanger, but it doesn't bode well for happily ever after. Does a contented life ever make a good story? Anyway, I'm hooked. I want to know what will happen in the next book: The Story of a New Name.

Readalikes: Some Luck (Smiley); The Almond Picker (Agnello Hornby); The Girls from Corona Del Mar (Rufi Thorpe), and also maybe Arcadia (Lauren Groff).

How to be both by Ali Smith

How to be both a girl and a boy.
How to be both sad and happy.
How to be both the surface image and the underpainting.
How to be both dead and alive.

Ali Smith's fresh and beautiful novel, How to be both, embraces contradictions.

It's one year after her mother's death and 16-year-old George is still grieving. She skips school to haunt London's National Gallery, to stand in front of one particular painting. It's by Francesco del Cossa, a 15th-century Italian artist whose fresco work captivated George's mother. The disembodied spirit of Francesco begins following George.

"Also, this girl is good at dance : I am enjoying some of the ways of this purgatorium now : one of its strangest is how its people dance by themselves in empty and music-less rooms and they do it by filling their ears with little blocks and swaying about to a silence, or to a noise smaller than the squee of a mosquito that comes through the little confessional grille in each of the blocks : the girl was doing a curving and jerking thing both, with the middle of her body, she went up then down then up again, sometimes so low down that it was a marvel to see her come back up again so quick, sometimes pivoting on one foot and sometimes on the other and sometimes on both with her knees bent then straightening into a sinuous undulate like a caterpillar getting the wings out of the caul, the new imago emerging from the random circumbendibus."

It was from her mother that George learned how to dance the twist. It is through her own inner resources and creative drive, with support from family and friends, that George learns to emerge from grief.

Smith is a master wordsmith. She knows "how to tell a story, but tell it more than one way at once, and tell another underneath it / up-rising through the skin of it."

How to be both is divided into two parts, both called "one." They are intended to be read interchangeably: some editions start with George, some with Francesco. That aspect alone would make for a good book discussion. There are so many other, deeper things to ponder, like art, perception, and the intangible gifts we get from people we love. This book is a masterpiece.

Readalike: Fabrizio's Return (Mark Frutkin)

Agostino by Alberto Moravia

A boy and his widowed mother spend a summer at the Tuscan seaside in Alberto Moravia's novella Agostino. It's a contemporary classic with a slow burn, awarded Italy's Corriere Lombardo literary prize in 1945. I read the new English translation by Michael Moore, published by New York Review Books.

Moravia's spare style is rhythmic and easy to read.

"[Agostino] rowed with deep pleasure on the smooth, diaphanous, early-morning sea, and his mother, sitting in front of him, would speak to him softly, as joyful and serene as the sea and sky, as if he were a man rather than a thirteen-year-old boy."

Ignorant of all things sexual and confused by his nascent infatuation with his mother, Agostino gets an abrupt education from a rough group of local boys. Once innocence is lost, it's gone for good. Moravia creates a dreamy chiaroscuro by playing Agostino's sense of a hidden adult world against the bright glare of sunny days at the beach. A beautifully stark novel.

Readalikes: Bonjour Tristesse (Francoise Sagan); A Little Wanting Song (Cath Cowley); and Love Falls (Esther Freud).

The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman

The Imperfectionists is about a mixed group of newspaper people -- reporters, editors, foreign correspondents, publishers and readers -- and about a small international English language newspaper headquartered in Rome. Canadian author Tom Rachman has created a kaleidoscope of 11 interlocking short stories, each one focused on a different character. Each story is titled with a newspaper headline and ends with a clever twist. The novel spans the 50 years of the paper's existence, right up to today's decline of print journalism.

A typical Roman street, taken on my last visit there.

The setting is so vivid that I not only got to walk the scenic streets of Rome, but continue right along inside the homes of people who live there. Private lives and work lives are contrasted with extraordinary insight.

Reviews of this book mentioned the humour, but as I listened to the audiobook narrated by Christopher Welch [Recorded Books: 9 hr 45 min] I felt it was more poignant than funny. I empathized deeply with the characters and was saddened by their troubles. After I had finished the audiobook, I read the paper book and discovered that some parts made me laugh. So I learned something new about myself. The visceral experience of audio can override my brain's recognition of what is comical about human foibles.

For example, there's the chapter "The Sex Lives of Islamic Extremists," in which two Americans are each hoping to get a Cairo stringer assignment. I felt bad for poor Winston Cheung, who was in over his head and annoyed by Rich Snyder, a blowhard opportunist. Yet check out this dialogue:

"I remember when I was in the Philippines during People Power back in the 1980s, and everyone's all, like, 'Oh man, Tagalog is so hard.' And I'm, like, 'Bull.' and within days, I'm, like, picking up chicks in Tagalog and stuff. That was after two days. Languages are totally overrated."
"So your Arabic must be excellent."
"Actually, I never speak foreign languages anymore," he explains. "I used to get so keyed into cultures that it was unhealthy. So I only talk in English now. Helps me maintain my objectivity."

In "Global Warming Good for Ice Creams" a cranky corrections editor fusses:

"GWOT: No one knows what this means, above all those who use the term. Nominally, it stands for Global War on Terror. But since conflict against an abstraction is, to be polite, tough to execute, the term should be understood as marketing gibberish. Our reporters adore this sort of humbug; it is the copy editor's job to exclude it. See also: OBL; Acronyms; and Nitwits."

The Imperfectionists is perfect: smart and funny and thought-provoking.

Readalike: A Visit from the Goon Squad (Jennifer Egan).

Extra Virginity by Tom Mueller

It's highly unlikely that the extra virgin olive oil that we find in grocery stores is correctly labelled, according to Tom Mueller in Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil. The book examines the widespread fraud associated with extra virgin olive oil, as well as the fascinating social and cultural history of this amazing fruit. I listened to the Dreamscape audiobook [10.2 hours] expertly read by Peter Ganim.

Each chapter opens with one or two quotations. I was particularly taken by this one from "Lady of the Vines" by Yannis Ritsos: "Silently, the olive is reading within itself the Scriptures of the stone."

Mueller's closing paragraphs contrast olive oil with wine:

"Wine in a meal is the soloist, set apart in its gleaming glass, while oil permeates the food, losing itself but subtly changing everything. Wine's effects on us are vivid and swift, while oil works on the body in hidden ways, slow and lingering in the cells and in the mind, like myths. Wine is merry Dionysus; oil is Athena, solemn, wise, and unknowable.
Wine is how we would like life to be, but oil is how life is: fruity, pungent, with a hint of complex bitterness -- extra virginity's elusive triad."

From the rise in popularity of the "Mediterranean diet" (and its distortion by the U.S. government into an anti-fat mesage) to chefs creating room-temperature ice cream based on olive oil -- there are so many interesting things in this book.

Another example is the eureka moment when scientist Gary Beauchamp recognized the specific sharp burn while tasting olive oil as being the same as that caused by ibuprofen. "It's not like hot peppers, which burn everywhere on your lips, mouth, throat. Ibuprofen produces an entirely different sensory percept, which is extremely localized in the throat, and only happens after you swallow it." Turns out that olive oil does indeed have similar anti-inflammatory properties.

I love micro-histories that focus on a single topic like this. Mark Kurlansky's Salt and Jenny Balfour-Paul's Indigo are of the same sort.

Companion read: The Olive Tree by Carol Drinkwater.

The Almond Picker by Simonetta Agnello Hornby, translated by Alistair McEwen

In Sicily in 1963, the death of the Alfallipe family's longtime maidservant is not the end of her influence upon them. Known as Mennulara (the almond picker), Maria Rosalia Inzerillo had worked for the Alfallipes since she was 13. At the time of Mennulara's death, she had been managing the Alfallipe family estate for years. How did she come to hold such power, far above her station in life? Why did an important mafia boss attend her funeral? And what about the inheritance due the three adult Alfallipe siblings? Will they still be forced to follow Mennulara's instructions now that she is dead?

Simonetta Agnello Hornby's The Almond Picker spans one month in time and encompasses a multitude of characters, each contributing a piece to the larger picture. I sometimes found it hard to keep track of how the different townspeople were related to each other and what their connections were with Mennulara. It didn't matter if the voices occasionally blended into a noisy crowd because the remarkable woman at the centre emerges clearly by the end of the novel. She was despised, loved, scorned and admired, depending on the individual.

Some folks get in trouble for prying to closely into Mennulara's background: "Today, he found that someone had destroyed the engine of his car, a Fiat Seicento, by pouring cement into it. Neither he nor that spineless boss of his knows which saint to turn to." Meanwhile, the Alfallipe siblings are exposed for their grasping, lazy, presumptuous and ungrateful selves -- putting on quite a spectacle for the town.

It's a big-hearted Italian Peyton Place and I highly recommend it.

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter

We can't help wanting what we want... and what we want is usually a car wreck. That's the message in Jess Walter's latest novel, Beautiful Ruins. Multiple story threads come together over a span of more than half a century. I like this sort of narrative style, switching between time periods, places, and characters at different stages in their lives.

It starts in a tiny village in Cinque Terre, Italy, where a movie actress stays for a few days in 1962. Then in modern day USA, the aging Italian hotel keeper travels to Hollywood to find out what happened to the actress. In between, there are babies born out of wedlock, a soldier in World War II whose greatest trouble is with his feet, actor Richard Burton drinking nonstop, and plenty of betrayals. Also the bonds of love, friendship and family that sustain us. What a great book!

I listened to the Recorded Books audiobook [13 hours] narrated in a lively way by Edoardo Ballerini, who could perform both the fluent Italian and butchered Italian, as required by the text. There's also a bit with the author answering a few questions at the end of the recording, which is a nice addition. Walter talks about researching the book by spending time in Cinque Terre and I was envious. I spent a few days hiking that coast in 2007 and it is breathtaking.

The contradictions that are inherent in the choices we make are highlighted in Beautiful Ruins. (And in the title, come to think of it.) So now I've started listening to Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational, which is nonfiction about the hidden forces that shape our decisions.

Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef by Gabrielle Hamilton

New York City restauranteur Gabrielle Hamilton says she loves to talk, so it isn't surprising that she narrates her own memoir in the audiobook edition (Random House; 10 hours). She's a fabulous storyteller and her unconventional life has provided her with plenty of good material. Hamilton was the youngest of five children in a bohemian family headed by a theatre set designer and a former ballet dancer. At thirteen, after her parents divorced, Gabrielle was mostly left to her own devices and amused herself by stealing cars, doing drugs and landing her first job (washing dishes).

A long series of kitchen and catering jobs, serial lesbian relationships and desultory higher education eventually led to the opening of her own restaurant, Prune. The place was mostly staffed by lesbians in its early years. Then, Hamilton was courted by an Italian doctor 11 years her senior and agreed to marry him so that he wouldn't be deported from the U.S. The couple had little to say to each other and continued to live separately for years, even after they had two children, coming together only for a yearly visit to his family in southern Italy. It is through this ill-conceived marriage, however, that Hamilton sorts out her complicated feelings about family, and which brings her narrative full-circle to a satisfying conclusion.

A deliciously salty combo of food, travel and learning things the hard way. I'll also recommend Blood, Bones and Butter to those of my friends who are tearing out their hair in frustration over their badass teenaged daughters, to give them hope that things will turn out in the end.

Georgia's Kitchen by Jenny Nelson

As part of my ongoing pursuit to find romantic fiction that I like, I read Georgia's Kitchen by first-time author Jenny Nelson. Reasons I thought I'd like it: it's about a woman chef and it's partly set in Tuscany. Which are the same reasons that I did enjoy it, plus the characterization of Georgia, the 33-year-old central character, and her relationships with lots of different people in her life.

I didn't love all the romantic angst, but that part didn't put me off the book in the way it might have if I was less hooked on other elements. The main hook was the inside view of what goes on in restaurant kitchens. I was also cheering for Georgia in her search for self-confidence and self-acceptance.

I also didn't love the many mentions of luxury brands and expensive New York City shops. (I'm dubious about the ability to tell that a business card was printed at a certain stationer just by the heft and sheen of the paper.) This name-dropping seems to be unavoidable in chick lit. The frequent references to Georgia's frizzy hair annoyed me too, since I got it the first time; her hair is difficult to control. Once would have been enough, but it was closer to once every chapter, usually with a frizz rating. Except for chapter 20, where we hear about a friend's hair for a change - "Her black hair hung in ropy, dreadlike chunks, completing the boho-chic look she was currently cultivating. The coif had probably set her back three hundred bucks at her chichi Madison Avenue salon."

Everything wraps up neatly for Georgia (and her hair) at the end. Food, friends, fiance, job hunting, single life, a faithful dog, New York, Italy and a happy ending. What else do you need?

Ciao Italia Five-Ingredient Favorites by Mary Ann Esposito

My sweetie and I hardly eat out anymore because we prefer our own cooking. Meals, including breakfast, are often some variation of sautéed vegetables with rice or pasta. Sometimes it's fun to try new recipes and, working at a library, I am spoiled for choice of cookbooks.

I've never watched Mary Ann Esposito's Ciao Italia television show, but the subtitle - Quick and Delicious Recipes from an Italian Kitchen - had me hooked. My fond memories of travelling in Italy always include the fabulous food. Plus, usually by the time I think of preparing a meal, I'm already hungry, so the "quick" part of the title sounds good too.

Whole Wheat Spaghetti with Roasted Vegetables has already become part of my standard repertoire. The first time I made it, however, I had to triple the suggested roasting time. (This didn't surprise me; I didn't expect them to be tender after 10 minutes, even though I chopped them smaller than instructed and used a higher oven temperature.)

Another recipe - Garlic, Oil, Walnut and Pecorino Sauce - seemed so out-of-proportion that I altered it without hesitation. It was supposed to dress a pound of linguine and called for 1 cup of olive oil, 2 cloves of garlic, 1/3 cup parsley, 1/2 cup walnuts and 1/4 cup grated pecorino cheese. I halved the oil and doubled the other ingredients and it was perfect. Then, I noticed a very similar recipe - Linguine with Walnut Sauce - in another section of the book. It called for 1/2 cup olive oil, 1 1/2 cups walnuts, 4 cloves of garlic and 1/2 cup of parsley served with 1 pound of linguine. The absence of cheese doesn't make the second recipe very much different from the first (aside from the proportions of each ingredient); it therefore seems an oversight to have them both included.

If you are an experienced cook who doesn't follow recipes so much as use them for inspiration, then this book will satisfy a craving for good Italian food.

Incontinent on the Continent by Jane Christmas

Jane Christmas, a Canadian journalist in her fifties, writes, "It has been a source of sadness and perplexity that my mother and I have not been able to get along." Ever. On his deathbed, her father requested that Jane make friends with her mother. So, she invited her mother to join her on a 6-week tour of Italy.

This account - subtitled My Mother, Her Walker, and Our Grand Tour of Italy - is witty and candid. Magical scenery, rude men, attractions that were closed (it was early spring), getting lost in labyrinthian medieval streets, unexpected generosity, days of cold rain and disappointing meals... told with upbeat humour, the details add up to a compelling travel story. It is also a touching journey of another sort, as Jane realizes just how frail her mother has become. Even though her mother continues to exasperate her, their bond appears to be stronger by the end of the trip.

How to Paint a Dead Man by Sarah Hall

Language is perhaps the biggest doorway into Sarah Hall’s intellectually stimulating novel about art and the meaning of life. I agree with The Daily Telegraph’s description: “a fine, vivid prose of exceptional poetic intensity and luminous beauty.” Characterization is also very strong; the story is told in four intertwined narratives. Peter Caldicutt (‘The Fool on the Hill’) is a famous landscape painter living in the north of England. Peter’s daughter Susan is also an artist - a photographer - but loses her bearings when her twin brother dies (‘The Mirror Crisis’). Giorgio, an elderly Italian still-life artist, records the very last part of his life (‘Translated from the Bottle Journals’). A blind Italian teenager who lives near Giorgio comes of age while her mother tries to protect her from all the evils of the world (‘The Divine Vision of Annette Tambroni’). If you love richly evoked settings, you will also find that in this book: the fells of Cumbria and the hills of Umbria. Put all of these parts together and you have a totally amazing book.

Kitty Kitty by Michele Jaffe

Seventeen-year-old amateur sleuth Jasmine Callihan attracts trouble even when she's trying to be a Model Daughter. On the day before school was to start, her evil father, Dadzilla, announced they were moving to Venice for an indefinite period of time. Jas misses Jack, her rock star boyfriend and her friends in California but she has been banned from using the internet ever since her dad saw the bill for the time she spent fourteen hours hitting the GET MAIL button, praying for Jack's name to pop into her inbox. Jas's new friend from Italian class, Arabella, is fun - but paranoid. She thinks someone is trying to kill her.

When Arabella ends up dead, Jas doesn't believe that it is suicide. She immediately gets embroiled in something dastardly. Her trusty friends introduced in two earlier novels (Bad Kitty and Bad Kitty: Catnipped) fly in from the U.S. to help keep Jas from the same fate as Arabella.

Polly has couture superpower; the ability to outdress anyone. Roxy's superpower is to be able to build things, like a taser out of tweezers. Tom's superpower is to perfectly imitate anyone's voice. Jack's superpower is to disable people with his smile. Poor Jasmine! Her only superpower is that she is attractive to cats.

When Polly arrives, she is horrified to find Jas wearing white leather pants. It doesn't take her long to restyle them into a cute pant-jacket. "The waist of the pants was now the neck of the jacket, and one of the pockets went across the front with a button. Polly was just explaining the safety features of the ensemble - 'The button on the front can be used as a cutting device, the hem of the dress detaches for restraining your hair or bad guys, the pocket can be ripped off and has been reinforced with your Wonderbra underwires to function as a throwing star, the cuff has a two-way radio built in, and we added a Skittles-based tracking device to your boots' - when her phone rang."

Jasmine's first person voice is highly entertaining. At a solemn, conversation-stopper moment "we all got really silent and stared at our nails like we were trying to be best friends with them. Hello tiny pals! Look at you putting the CUTE in CUTICLE!" After a long stretch of little sleep, she declares, "my bed looked like a slice of linen meringue pie and I dove right into it."

Madcap thrills, a touch of danger, amusing sartorial commentary and general hilarity ensue. In the end, everything is "hunky with a side of dory."