Review by New York Times Review
It might be just a coincidence. Or another sign of publishing's adaptation to the age of austerity. In any case, this season's most interesting travel books have gone into staycation mode. Their authors aren't any less curious about the wider world, but they tend to be nest builders, not vagabonds. Some, of course, have built nests in pretty remote places. Others are getting views of the open road without packing a suitcase. And one manages to have it both ways: pulling up stakes whenever the mood strikes, bringing her home right along with her. How does a British pianist wind up in a South American backwater that bears a startling resemblance to the Wild West? She marries an agricultural economist who was raised in Kenya, follows him from Nairobi to Jakarta to Washington to New Delhi to Recife and back to Washington on the international-aid circuit, raises a family and then, when his midlife crisis takes the form of chucking it all to work on his own farm, finds herself camping out in a derelict fazenda in the wilds of Minas Gerais, a seven-hour drive from Rio de Janeiro. In WHERE THE ROAD ENDS: A Home in the Brazilian Rainforest (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's, $25.99), Binka Le Breton learns to coexist with killer bees, vampire bats and poisonous snakes. And she discovers that some aspects of the human landscape are hardly less dangerous. Many of the local people - the children and grandchildren of Italian immigrants who intermarried with Indians and the descendants of African slaves - remain in thrall to "the ancient tradition of the vendetta." Le Breton's husband, Robin, could easily star in "Little House in the Jungle" as he organizes a band of workers to clear the fields, set up a dairy and build a barn and then a new house, complete with flower-filled courtyard and bathing pool. And as Le Breton describes the gradual sinking of their roots in the rural community, an extensive supporting cast ambles into view. Albertinho, the illiterate cowboy whose family is attached to the property by virtue of squatter's rights, schedules the timing of his chores, as well as his assessment of the neighbors' sociability, by the phases of the moon. Lenin, a vastly hospitable landowner (named, along with his brother, Roosevelt, for the two men his father most admired) loves passing along tidbits of regional history, including the unnerving tale of just how the Le Bretons' property came to be on the market: the previous owner was murdered. Even bit players like elderly Dona Cecilia and her twin sons, who take turns wearing the family's one set of false teeth, have their place in Le Breton's own storytelling. As do the animals: Split, her Dalmatian, inspires the local children to think of dogs as pets instead of anonymous nuisances; Mrs. Thatcher, a pedigreed Toggenburg, is as intractable as her namesake, refusing to mix with the native goats. Despite years of trials - including an inflation rate that at one point varies from 10 to 80 percent, per month - the Le Bretons succeed in establishing a 21st-century outpost in a 19th-century society. Now, instead of driving their pickup truck to the nearest town to use the telephone at the bar, they have an Internet connection. And instead of spending their evenings listening to the rain pour through the tiles of their crumbling roof, they can flick a switch to fill the house with Mozart. But the ancestral beauty of the land around them is still intact, thanks in part to the conservation center they've established. And in their parlor, Le Breton proudly notes, is "probably the only grand piano within a hundred miles." You won't find pianos of any sort in the 350-year-old farmhouse Rebecca Otowa acquires in AT HOME IN JAPAN: A Foreign Woman's Journey of Discovery (Tuttle, $21.95). Especially since the place comes with resident in-laws determined to transform their son's boisterous American bride into a properly submissive Japanese housewife. Since this involves everything from maintaining the family shrines to harvesting tea to preparing meal trays with up to 20 separate dishes for each guest ("No wonder the Japanese word for feast . . . contains the character for 'running around frantically'"), Otowa often chafes under the burden of her responsibilities. But as the years pass, she comes to appreciate the comfort of knowing her place in an established routine. Living in a house where the tatami-matted rooms are made larger or smaller simply by sliding thin paper-and-wood panels is a constant reminder that in many countries privacy is considered an indulgence. But if a lovely little garden is waiting on the other side of that shoji screen, maybe there are other compensations. Otowa learns to love the communal rituals that track the seasons in her adopted country: celebrating the first plum and cherry blossoms of spring with picnics under the trees; dancing in late summer at O-Bon, when the whole nation pauses to honor the spirits of the dead; pounding out rice cakes in a wooden mortar to celebrate the arrival of the new year. The Japanese may dash around on high-speed trains and fill cyberspace with text messages, but their daily life still offers plenty of old-fashioned beguilements: "the delicately patterned and meticulously folded gift wrappings in the department stores," "the humble dark blue noodle-shop curtains splashed with white calligraphy," the thatched roof of a hut "with the globes of orange persimmons hanging like lanterns against a high autumn sky." The phrase "fitting in," has, Otowa concludes, "a restrictive sound; though this was the reality for me for many years, now I prefer to think of it as 'embracing' - and it takes two to embrace. Me and Japan." It's hard to believe almost 15 years have passed since I first read and wrote about Frances Mayes's embrace of an abandoned country house she christened Bramasole. Her life has changed a lot since the publication of "Under the Tuscan Sun," and in her latest memoir, EVERY DAY IN TUSCANY: Seasons of an Italian Life (Broadway, $25), she reports with amusement on the tourists who now arrive in Cortona intent on literary stalking. From her study window, she can eavesdrop on their conversations ("This can't be Bramasole - that screen is wonky"; "My house is much bigger than this") and when she has a coffee in town she's apt to overhear some all-too-familiar names. ("I saw Frances Mayes's husband, Ed, driving a Fiat. A Fiat - and one of those tiny ones. Wouldn't you think they'd have something better?") So it's not hard to understand why she and her husband have acquired another, more secluded, retreat on nearby Monte Sant'Egidio: a little stone cottage surrounded by oak and chestnut trees that was, she likes to think, originally occupied eight centuries ago by "hermit followers" of St. Francis. Rebecca and Toshiro Otowa in traditional dress at their 1981 wedding, from "At Home in Japan." The renovation of Fonte delle Foglie (Font of Leaves) is lovingly described in the course of Mayes's typically effusive account of her Italian travels, her Italian friends and her Italian kitchen. "When I return to Tuscany," she confides, "my senses feel hyperactive for the first few days; even simple things appear super-real. The volatile oil in the just-planted basil, tiny pointillist olive flowers, my neighbor Chiara's magnificent smile. . . . I experience everything as if for the first time." It's no surprise, then, that the feasts she serves in her new mountain hideaway are replayed with gusto - and that she shares enough recipes to inspire even novice cooks to experiment with a vegetable lasagna or a fruit-filled crostata. Mayes was among the early practitioners of what my colleague Christine Muhlke calls the "foodoir" - autobiography that stews in its own often delicious juices. These days food-oriented memoirs are everywhere, and that includes the travel bookshelves. In LUNCH IN PARIS: A Love Story, With Recipes (Little, Brown, $23.99), Elizabeth Bard adds another installment to what seems like a never-ending detective series: tales of hapless foreigners trying to decode the mysteries of French culture and cuisine. In among her notes on the dishes she prepares for her Breton-born boyfriend, Gwendal, in their tiny Paris apartment, Bard ruefully considers the subtleties of Franco-American relations. The party to introduce her to his parents, his godparents and 40 of his "nearest and dearest friends" seems to have etched its terrors particularly deeply. "Even as I said it," she recalls, "I realized it might be a little early for bonsoir, and I got the feeling that enchantée might be limited to State Department cocktail hours. . . . All I really wanted to get across was an old-fashioned 'pleasure to meet you,' but Gwendal told me flat out that I couldn't use the word plaisir without implying something sexual. Maybe it wasn't going to be such a pleasure to meet these people after all." By the end of the book, Bard has notched significant gains over French etiquette, French cooking and even the French real estate market. Newly married, newly ensconced in a more spacious apartment with a serious kitchen, she buys her first big piece of furniture: a wooden dining table that will seat 12 "without touching elbows, 16 in a pinch." Inspired to put her own spin on Gallic hospitality, she lays out a Passover Seder that includes wild salmon, lamb tagine and her Aunt Joyce's coconut macaroons. "So much of what I'd learned about France," she explains, "I'd discovered autour de la table - around the table. Finally I had one of my own." Ann Vanderhoof applies the same strategy to the West Indies in THE SPICE NECKLACE: My Adventures in Caribbean Cooking, Eating, and Island Life (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25, available in late June). Except her kitchen is the galley of a 42-foot sailboat called Receta (Spanish for "Recipe") and meals are most often eaten on deck. Vanderhoof and her husband, Steve, are refugees from the Canadian winter whose first excursions aboard Receta were described in the aptly titled "An Embarrassment of Mangoes." Vanderhoof's curiosity about the food and (lots of) drink on the islands is appropriately all-consuming, but attempting to retain even a fraction of the information she uncovers about sapodillas, nutmeg, sorrel, passion fruit, conch and the seemingly endless array of other Caribbean edibles can be a dizzying experience. Try too hard and you may collapse with something resembling the buzz from Jah Daniel, the moonshine she tracks down in Dominica, "flavored with a generous fistful of ganja." Better simply to drift on the tide of the Receta's travels through the eastern Caribbean, from St. Martin all the way down to Grenada and Trinidad, listening to the lively banter of women like Dingis and Miss Pat, who become Vanderhoof's friends while letting her hang around their stoves, and fishermen like Dwight and Stevie, who swing by to drop off their catch and sample her lobster pizza. The Vanderhoofs wander wherever the winds and their appetites take them: to a cocoa research station, a curry factory, a 100-year-old spice market on St. Lucia, even the reef-enclosed bay where some very canny women harvest sea moss, "the island version of Viagra," and sell it as an "energy drink" with a younger version of Popeye on the label. In Trinidad, even without the aid of sea moss, the Vanderhoofs shed at least some of their inhibitions ("the mistake North Americans and Europeans make is that they dance from the waist up") and enlist in a raucous troupe of Carnival marchers. Luckily, they've also learned some Caribbean remedies for recuperation: coconut water (which has the same electrolyte balance as blood and was given to wounded soldiers in the Pacific during World War II as an emergency substitute for plasma) and corn soup with dumplings ("For true Trini authenticity serve scorching hot in Styrofoam cups. And put on a steelpan CD"). "Food became our route into island life," Vanderhoof hardly needs to point out, "and strangers turned into friends." The novelist Nani Power employs that tactic in GINGER AND GANESH: Adventures in Indian Cooking, Culture and Love (Counterpoint, $25), but without leaving her home in Virginia. "I am a single woman in my 40s," she confides, "who uses Craigslist for most everything." So why not satisfy her abiding interest in India by advertising online for amateur cooks willing to provide lessons in Indian cuisine? Over the course of a year, Power is welcomed into the homes of expat women from all over the subcontinent whose customs are conveyed along with their tricks for roasting spices and rolling out chapatis. The intensely varied cultures of their homeland are being recreated, Power finds, in condos and subdivisions that have two features in common: a fragrant, slightly messy kitchen ("a hearth, not a showpiece") and a husband in the living room, glued to his computer. "A lot of these ladies," she realizes, "are responding because of loneliness. . . . They want to connect." It's the same for her too. But Power's loneliness leads to a difficult love affair with the brother of one of her teachers, a college student young enough, she reminds herself, to call her "aunty" if they were back in his native Punjab. Gradually, Power's story comes to be dominated less by what she's learning about a foreign country than by what she's learning about her own conflicted emotions. And as the narrative takes on the inadvertent air of a Bollywood melodrama, the clear, crisp prose of the recipes starts to look ever more enticing. There's a quieter drama at play in Carol Eron Rizzoli's first book, THE HOUSE AT ROYAL OAK: Starting Over and Rebuilding a Life One Room at a Time (Black Dog & Leventhal, $22.95). When Rizzoli and her husband, Hugo, decide to open a bed-and-breakfast inn on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, they realize the travelers who visit them will expect "an idealized kind of home, more homey somehow than a real one." What they don't expect is that Hugo will have a major stroke soon after they've opened for business. "Just think," her sister tells her over the phone, with patently fraudulent good cheer, "after this, nothing about this business will ever be hard again." That's not quite the case, but it won't spoil anything to reveal that Rizzoli and her husband are even now presiding over their three-bedroom establishment, companionably arguing about whose blackberry muffins are better (you can decide; she provides recipes for both) and taking time from their chores to appreciate the countryside around them: "The scent of a freshly mown field, the first sighting of the osprey pairs in spring, early summer calls of the bob-white, the clammy smell of the late-summer creek, the geese families arriving in fall." Theirs is the kind of domestic travelogue that demonstrates the wisdom of the lines from Emily Dickinson that Rizzoli has chosen for her epigraph: "Eden is that old-fashioned House / We dwell in every day / Without suspecting our abode / Until we drive away." Alida Becker is an editor at the Book Review.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 6, 2010]
Review by Booklist Review
I slept with my French husband halfway through our first date, begins Bard, a Paris-based American journalist, and she goes on to describe falling in love with both Gwendal, her Brittany-born amour, and with her adopted city, where she learns to shop for and cook delectable meals on a tiny two-burner stove (instructions for preparing the dishes close each chapter). Bard lacks the culinary chops of other recent romance-and-recipe memoirists in the increasingly crowded genre, such as New York Times food writer Amanda Hesser, whose Cooking for Mr. Latte (2003) also chronicled her path to marriage. And while Bard does include numerous, cinema-ready glimpses into her relationship with Gwendal (when she finally moves in, the adorable way he welcomes her feels pulled from a romantic comedy), both the love story and the food story feel slightly muted next to what seems to be the book's deepest undercurrent: how to build an adult life that reconciles societal pressure, personal ambition, cultural dissonance, and true happiness.--Engberg, Gillian Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this pleasant memoir about learning to live and eat Ø la francaise, an American journalist married to a Frenchman inspires lessons in culinary detente. Bard was working as a journalist in London and possessed of the "wonderful puppy-dog" enthusiasm of young Americans when she first met her husband-to-be, Gwendal, a computer engineer from Brittany. Soon he had the foresight to put her name on the gas bill of his Parisian apartment in the 10th arrondissement, and they were destined to marry-and cook together. Her memoir is really a celebration of the culinary season as it unfolded in their young lives together: recipes for seduction (onion and bacon); getting serious over andouillette; learning to buy what's fresh at the Parisian markets (four and a half pounds of figs); surviving a long, cold winter in an unheated apartment; and warming up their visiting parents over profiteroles. Bard throws in some American recipes "that feel like home," such as noodle pudding, and comforting soups for a winter's grieving over the death of the father-in-law. Bard carefully observes the eating habits of her impossibly slender mother-in-law for tips to staying slim (lots of water and no snacking). Bard keeps an eye to healthful ingredients ("Three Fabulous Solo Lunches"), and, as a Jewish New Yorker, even prepares a Passover seder in Paris, in this work that manages to be both sensuous and informative. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The dream of falling in love with a Frenchman and diving into the expat life in Paris is always surrounded by stories of food and intercultural fumbles. Bard, an American journalist, takes us along on her romantic adventure, delighting us with humor, poignant insights, and the occasional personal struggle. She learns her way around French food and culture and shares recipes and etiquette tips, though not to the extent that Polly Platt does in her own intercultural instruction manual, French or Foe?: Getting the Most Out of Visiting, Living and Working in France. Go with Bard as she explores the open-air markets, bonds with her butcher, and introduces American comfort food to her French family. Verdict Filled with vignettes of faux pas, lessons learned, and delicious desserts, this memoir is a great, light read that lovers of food and romance will tear through. It will make you want to cook up something to savor while you cuddle up with the book.-Sheila Kasperek, Millersville Univ. of Pennsylvania (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
American journalist Bard traces her relationship with her French husband from the first lunch date to the present, framing the narrative around mouthwatering menus. The book starts out vanilla, but the author's charming narrative and penetrating insights quickly add a subtle complexity that will captivate readers. Having met her future husband Gwendal at an academic conference in London, Bard soon invented an excuse to visit Paris. Eventually she moved in to Gwendal's tiny apartment and began her initiation into Parisian life. She pleasantly details her joys and obstacles, including her difficulties with grumpy fishmongers and complicated meat-market lines, and she provides poignant revelations about cultural differences that are alternately easy to overcome and seemingly insurmountable. The idea of love conquering all is certainly a clich, but the author's unique voice prevents her story from becoming stale. One of the most enlightening aspects of French culture that Bard reveals is the fact that in Paris, the customer is not always right. Whether it's the chef for the wedding hors d'oeuvres or the doctor treating her father-in-law's colon cancer, the author learned that one must bow to the opinion of the professional. Ultimately, Paris had much to offer Bard, including lessons in how to cook delectable meals with whatever is at hand, or the simplicity of sitting in a caf and relaxing with a coffee and croissant. Despite the many delicious recipes, the motif of food only provides a loose framework for the book, leaving the narrative somewhat disjointed in places. This does not, however, diminish Bard's entertaining voice. A cozy, touching story. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
