Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Late Neopolitan painter and writer Castaldi (1951--2019) excites in her seductive English-language debut, originally published in 2012, about an Italian woman who finds joy in becoming a restaurateur. Rosa, a 50-year-old widow from Naples, lives in Monticelli with her grown daughter, with whom she has a cordial but distant relationship. Rosa spends her time preparing flavorful dishes to quiet her self-destructive thoughts, brought on by angst over her domestic responsibilities and guilt over removing her husband from life support years earlier after a car crash. When her daughter announces she's moving to France, Rosa transforms her house into a restaurant. Soon her evenings are filled with wealthy industrialists, Mafia associates, and other patrons eager to indulge in her cooking. Having given herself over completely to the sensual pleasures found in preparing food for others, Rosa embarks on torrid love affairs with several women and attracts controversy for refusing to live on anyone's terms but her own. Exquisitely rendered in a poetic stream-of-consciousness that brims with lush descriptions of Rosa's recipes, Castaldi's novel is an ode to pleasure, culinary and otherwise. Stirring and vulnerable, this is not to be missed. (Dec.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A middle-aged widow in a small town starts her own restaurant and a scandalous love affair in this novel by the late Italian author and artist Castaldi. Rosa learned to cook from her mother, who learned to cook from hers, "in the kitchen that was her life's prison and salvation." For these Italian women, food occupies a complicated place: "Only by passing down her love for making food that her mother had passed down to her did she find a crumb of eternity on this earth." In stream-of-consciousness prose free of most punctuation, Castaldi evokes a woman resisting societal expectations, embracing her lesbianism, and practicing the domestic art of cooking. Of food Rosa says, "First it was something divine simple and natural and later became something controlled regimented and overwhelming But food conserves the nature of the ages and the wisdom of God." Castaldi has an incantatory, experimental style and a poet's gift for repetition and imagery. Her gastronomic details are so rich and exuberant they threaten to highjack the narrative, and Rosa's simultaneous wooing of two local women feels less significant than her recipe for Neapolitan pastiera. A novel about women and their often unseen and unacknowledged manual labor, its strength lies less in plot than in the breadth of its vision and Castaldi's oneiric evocation of the sensual pleasures--and importance--of food. "Accept my gift--Reader--I have fought my battle in life with food I've erected to the heavens cathedrals of pastry and baked longing and pleasure Accept my gift--Reader--I am only a woman I sleep alone Pause with me--Reader--in the suspended time of the eternal present in the land abandoned by God and men under the absolute immobile imploded light of things that exist even without being seen in the sea on the earth in the sky of God in the suspended time of the eternal present in infinite life." Unconventional, impassioned, vivid, and delicious, though not, perhaps, to every reader's taste. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
