Book Tamers| book reviews

I admit wanting to read this book because I was sure I would crave for delicious meals. Mark Crick is practically an unknown voice in the world of letters and about his first book he says it was funny to conceive. We know it’s true that discussions with writers are spicy; why wouldn’t we know what they are up to in the kitchen? Not everyone is familiar with the secrets of Ars culinaria; not even in the gourmet position we can’t imagine all those presented in the book, but it is a good exercise.

In his Physiology of Taste, Brillat-Savarin says that there is a sensual predestination for gourmandise (a word that can’t really be translated in other languages and which hasn’t its flavor but in French). I don’t know how many are those who could ever imagine Kafka eating, let alone cooking. It is probably the explanation why his recipe is the one that entitles the book. There is a resemblance of the soup can on the cover with Warhol’s can, each chapter being associated with images from Picasso’s, De Chirico’s or Matisse’s works, that Crick himself painted.Whether there are luxuriant coq au vin or plaice à la Dieppe or the more laic mushroom risotto or cheese sandwiches, the fourteen recipes are an occasion for imitation for the author - Crick himself says that it was very hard to render the stream of consciousness technique in Virginia Woolf’s style- and an original method through which the reader gets in touch with the style of an author he doesn’t still know.

 

The recipes are in no evident order, neither chronological, nor alphabetical, but consist of the four meals presented during a feast, all guaranteeing the good stimulation of the taste buds of a fan of extraordinary foods. My imagination being started, I have to admit that I would have figured that Marcel Proust was more fascinated by a cake with figs and pears, marinated in Jamaican rum and not by the trivial tiramisu. Also, the sexual hints in the chicken recipe à la Marquis de Sade are quite frail; or the relationship between the sexual and the culinary appetite is undeniable.

Parodying the expression techniques of the writers in question does not remove in any way the innovating manner with which the British writer approaches the 14 writers. This book is probably a precedent for the one who will try structuring an anthology about the drinks that influence a writer to write in a certain way.

Written by Ioana