Cooking With Fernet Branca (2005) - Plot & Excerpts
Rating: 3.75* of fiveThe Publisher Says: Gerald Samper, an effete English snob, has his own private hilltop in Tuscany, where he wiles away his time working as a ghostwriter for celebrities and inventing wholly original culinary concoctions-including ice cream made with garlic and the bitter, herb-based liqueur of the book's title. Gerald's idyll is shattered by the arrival of Marta, on the run from a crime-riddled former Soviet republic. A series of hilarious misunderstandings brings this odd couple into ever closer and more disastrous proximity.James Hamilton-Paterson's first novel, Gerontius, won the Whitbread Award. He is an acclaimed author of nonfiction books, including Seven-Tenths, Three Miles Down, and Playing with Water, He currently lives in Italy.My Review: Cooking With Fernet Branca is part of oddball publisher Europa Editions's sinister plot to make Murrikins like me aware of the strange and sinister world of lit'rachoor published beyond our shores. Muriel Barbery owes her Murrikin presence to them, too. We all know how *that* turned out....Well, before moving any farther along in this review process, let me send out the call: Does anyone know how to get hold of (wicked double entendre optional) actor John Barrowman? You know, Captain Jack Harkness of Torchwood fame? He is literally missing the key to Murrikin stardom by not reading, optioning, and making this book into a movie. It suits every single national prejudice we have: Eastern Europeans as sinister lawbreaking peasants who eat strangely shaped, colored, and named things and call them foods (like Twinkies, Cheetos, and Mountain Dew are *normal*); Englishmen as dudis (you'll have to read the book for that translation) who do eccentric off-the-wall things with food that are repulsively named and gruesomely concocted (spotted dick? bubble-and-squeak?); and Italians as supercilious effete cognoscenti of world culture, who possess the strangest *need* for vulgarity.The characters in this hilarious romp are the most dysfunctional group of misfits and ignoramuses and stereotypes ever deployed by an English-language author. They do predictable things, yet Hamilton-Paterson's deftly ironic, cruelly flensing eye and word processor cause readerly glee instead of readerly ennui to ensue. The whole bizarre crew...the lumpenproletariat ex-Soviet composer, the Italian superdirector long past his prime, the English snob who refers to Tuscany's glory as "Chiantishire" and "Tuscminster"...gyrates and shudders and clumps towards a completely foreseeable climactic explosion (heeheehee). And all the time, snarking and judging and learning to depend on each other. In the end, the end is nigh for all the established relationships and the dim, Fernet Branca-hangover-hazed outlines of the new configurations are, well, the English say it best...dire.Read it. Really, do. And I dare you not to laugh at these idiots! Don't be put off by the sheer hideousness of the American edition's cover, in all its shades-of-purple garish grisliness. The charm of reading the book is that one needn't look at that...that...illustration...on the cover, but inflict it on those not yet In The Know enough to be reading it themselves.And seriously...John Barrowman needs to know about this. Pass it on! This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Whatever else we can say about James Hamilton-Paterson, he is a very funny man. If you ever found yourself in the Italian countryside gazing at the villa next door and wondering who lives there and who, for gosh sakes, is coptering in and out, after reading this novel, you may very well decide you don’t really want to know. It may be entangling, and may, after all, be the end of all you hold dear.Gerald Samper, British biographer to the rich and famous, buys an old villa in need of repair in Tuscany’s Apuan Alps region. He is told, as is his nearby neighbor, that the owner of the nearby villa is rarely in residence so his quest for privacy and solitude is guaranteed. Of course, nothing could be farther from the truth. In fact, the resident of the villa he can see from his own is none other than a well-to-do refugee from a Soviet republic, with all her entangling connections.Samper likes cooking, and we are treated to recipes inspired by the abundant local produce, but dreamt up entirely within the convoluted confines of Samper’s own twisted mind: Mussels in Chocolate, say, or Baked Pears in Gorgonzola with Cinnamon Cream, Lampreys in Sherry, Alien Pie, which features smoked cat mixed with baby beets, nasturtium leaves, pureed prunes, and green bacon (what on earth…?), or my personal favorite, Tuna Stuffed with Prunes in Marmite Butter. But Samper deprecates (with good reason) the specialties his neighbor offers him, delicacies delivered direct from the former Soviet republic of Voynovia. As described by Samper:”…brightly colored voynovian objects that were delicate to the same extent that traffic cones are. There were awesome pellets like miniature doughnuts wrapped in candied angelica leaf and injected with chili sauce. Others looked like testicles set in dough. I gathered these were pigeon’s eggs and couldn’t catch her name for them although the phrase that came to me immediately was Christ on a Tricycle. Spearmint eggs?”But this book is not about cooking, despite the title. It is about living the good life in Tuscany among other artists—writers, musicians, filmmakers, realtors--magicians of all stripes. And what of Fernet Branca? It is a digestif concocted in Italy that, given as a gift to the new arrivals of Le Roccie, is purchased a second time to return the courtesy, and becomes a central feature of the misunderstandings among the residents and visitors there. It is described in Wikipedia as having the flavor of “black-licorice-flavored Listerine."
What do You think about Cooking With Fernet Branca (2005)?
A hilarious spoof of the "A Year in Provence" and "Under the Tuscan Sun" type travelogues focused on a couple of real weirdos, Gerald and Marta who end up as neighbours on a clifftop in Italy. The odious Gerald fancies himself as a gourmand of discriminating tastes and not half shabby as a chef but unless you fancy variously cooked domestic animals paired with exotic and highly potent Italian liqueurs and other combustible combinations, you won't be rushing off to the stove to follow his recipes. Marta is a rather unique character as well. Not meaning to do any disservice to Miriam Margolyes but I couldn't help picturing her in the role if this book ever got made into a film (which it should). Cleverly written and very entertaining, so long as you don't expect anything remotely resembling credibility.
—Anne Green
I didn't manage to read this in Mexico, though I was told it would be the perfect smart-person airplane book, but I did pick it up as soon as I got back, and it was very much as promised: dryly hilarious, fast-moving, clever, and a whole lot of fun. Cooking With Fernet Branca is dual-ly narrated by two next-door neighbors living on the Italian countryside: Gerard Samper, a very proper Englishman and self-proclaimed "master chef" (more on that soon), who makes his money ghostwriting autobiographies for idiotic sports stars; and Marta, a somewhat bumpkin-ish composer from Eastern Europe (Voynovia, actually) who has been commissioned to write a film score for a famous arty and controversial Italian film director. So. Gerard and Marta are incredibly well-drawn characters, from her pidgin English and lovingly frazzled appearance to his fastidious mannerisms and constant stream of sarcastic inner monologue. They are both a bit unreliable as narrators, which is done with great subtlety at times, and then become very overt when the narrative switches sides and we get to see the same scene retold through the other's eyes. Their relationship is so complex, so changing, so real, that it carries the entire book brilliantly. See, they hate each other. I mean, each was told when they bought their houses that their immediate neighbor was quiet and calm, and would only be home maybe one month out of the year. But Marta's brother keeps stopping by in a helicopter in the middle of the night, and Gerard sings horrifically off-key opera while he avoids work by loudly building fences and other such, and each drives the other totally crazy with their drunkenness and terrifying cooking. And oh, the cooking!! This is where the book's darkest humor shimmers horrifyingly. Gerard, who punctuates his sections with explicitly detailed recipes, loves to cook. And the things he cooks are...well...not for the faint of heart. Examples include: stuffed udder in butterscotch sauce, smoked cat pot pie, parrots 'n' carrots, horse custard, and more and more. In fact, one of the subtle ways in which he wages war with Marta is with cuisine mépriseur, the cuisine of contempt. She – though unwittingly – does about the same thing, by always trying to feed him homemade Voynovian treats, which are every bit as horrifying to his palate as his deep-fried mice would be to hers. In any case, of course, they bicker and fight and scheme and plot, and eventually work their way into one another's good graces, more or less. There is much much more to this book than I have let on here, but I hope I have at least...whet some appetites, as it were, because I really think James Hamilton-Paterson ought to be better known. I plan to get both the other books he's written about Gerard and Marta tout suite, before the fall ends and I am expected to read more, er, serious literature.
—Oriana
I don't worry too much about the star rankings here but 5 seems like it should be reserved for the equivalent of "War and Peace" or something, rather than a brilliant comic novel in the tradition of Nabokov or Kingsley Amis.Set in Tuscany ("Chiantishire" is echoed in the first chapter), the narrative alternates chapters between a cynical hard-drinking Englishman who earns his living ghostwriting autobiographies of sports stars and likes anagrams, and his neighbor in the countryside, a female film music composer trying to escape the constrictions of her wealthy but controlling father in a fictitious Eastern European country (shades of Zembla).The Englishman, Gerald Samper, punctuates the narrative with recipes from a very idiosyncratic cuisine reminiscent of Charles Arrowby in Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea, though taken quite a bit further in a darkly comic direction ("Jack Russells are absolute buggers to bone, notoriously so, but yield a delicate, almost silky pâté that seems to welcome the careworn diner with both paws on the edge of the table, as it were.").
—Bob
