La Cucina: A Novel Of Rapture (2001) - Plot & Excerpts
Title - La Cucina: A Novel of RaptureAuthor - Lily PriorSummary - This is the tale of Rosa Fiore, a peasant Sicilian girl who grows up in a passionate household and who in her way finds her own passions. From the men she loves to the cooking she does. Rosa's family has always been suspect in her small village. Her mother's powerful and lustful ways the stuff of much gossip. Until the birth of her brothers, Siamese twins, proof of her mother's wickedness the gossip was always in whispers. For Rosa, in her youth she falls in love with young Bartolomeo, the son of a local Don of the Mafioso. A relationship that would not be permitted."..Then you may begin the rolling. Dust the table lightly with flour and divide your dough into eight equal pieces. Taking one piece, begin rolling by moving the rolling pin in a motion away from you, pressing evenly to create a rectangular shape. Continue thus until your sheet of pasta is long and thin and about the thickness of the blade of a knife. The knife that slit Bartolomeo's throat. Slicing through his beautiful young flesh like coltello through lard..." In her grief, young Rosa cooks and cooks. Her recipes and abundance of food feeds her family and the village. She cooks herself into exhaustion. No longer able to stay in the village where her young love was murdered she leaves to become a librarian in the small town of San Domenico. Twenty five years pass and she has settled into a new life of her own. Far from her village, from her family and from the two passions in her life. Until one day a foreigner comes into the library looking for manuscripts on the recipes of the cultures that had built the city and the island of Sicily. With the arrival of this L'Inglese, the passions that had laid dormant in Rosa would re-ignite. Her love and her cooking."..Of course, signor," I said very quickly, as if afraid my courage would desert me at the last moment, "if you really want to know about our food, you will not find it in books." "No?" L'Inglese read the signal. "You, um, you need someone to show you." I looked at him squarely while blushing like a beetroot. "You mean you cook, signorina?" he asked, his eyes bright with a sudden fire." "Signor," I said, "I cook..." Together, with her L'Inglese, Rosa comes alive again. But will the disapproval of her family reach out to take her happiness away once again?Review - La Cucina is very similar in its telling as Like Water For Chocolate and if you loved Like Water for Chocolate, you will love La Cucina. If you didn't get Like Water for Chocolate, you will not get La Cucina. It is romantic and passionate but not erotica in a obvious way. It is subtle yet powerful. Prior chooses to be descriptive about the passion and dreams of her characters rather than the acts themselves. The influence of family and small village life is also interesting and adds another dimension to the happenings in this novel. All around a very good read.
L’histoireLa Cucina se passe au début du 20e siècle. C’est l’histoire de Rosa, une jeune italienne qui adore faire la cuisine. Elle soulage ses inquiétudes, ses joies, ses colères etc. en faisant à manger pour sa famille et elle-même. Lorsque son amoureux est assassiné, elle quitte sa campagne natale pour aller vivre sa vie en ville. Elle y passera près de 25 ans de sa vie comme bibliothécaire. À l’aube de ses 25 ans de service, elle rencontre un étranger avec lequel s’ensuivra une relation mystérieuse et torride. Bien sûr, une histoire d’Italie ne serait pas complète sans la présence de la mafia…Mes impressionsHonnêtement, j’ai trouvé ce petit livre incroyable. L’histoire est belle et très captivante. L’auteure fait des liens constants entre la vie de Rosa et la cuisine italienne. De plus, le vocabulaire employé permet au lecteur de concevoir la relation entre Rosa et l’étranger, c’est-à-dire la passion entre les deux amoureux.Lily Prior fait sentir au lecteur qu’il est partie intégrante de l’histoire. Les descriptions des scènes d’amour sont très imagées, passionnées et délicieuses.Je vous conseille de lire ce petit bijou en anglais afin de savourer le vocabulaire employé pour nous faire vivre les émotions des personnages et rendre l’histoire ce qu’elle est.
What do You think about La Cucina: A Novel Of Rapture (2001)?
Definitely a page turner: I read it in less than three hours. However, I didn't enjoy it as the love interest's personality was repellent. For example, "[he] waved me ahead of him up the spiral staircase. I had reached halfway before I realized that he had positioned himself directly underneath and was looking up my skirts. I tried to gather the material close around my legs so he could not see anything, but in truth, he had already seen everything. He smiled broadly at my discomfort." Urgh. Also, the sex scenes were nauseating.
—Jane
4.5 StarsOkay guys, remember all the hype surrounding Eat, Pray, Love - about how it was all about the food and the celebration of being your own person? And then you read it and found it to be a pretty vapid and pretentious travelogue? Well, then La Cucina: A Novel of Rapture might actually satisfy you if you are looking for something similar to what was promised with that other book.Not only are there a ton of mouth-watering descriptions of Sicilian cooking, but the prose is actually scrumptious. Really. When I see people reviewing a book and saying the writing was "beautiful", I usually roll my eyes because what a lot of readers call "beautiful" really just amounts to 8th grade poetry. Not here. La Cucina is written much like Italian cooking - rustic and simple, yet elegant and filling.
—J.
Pretty good tale, light reading, although not as mad as Nectar (I did like Nectar!). This was a light, love and romance and cooking story - I suppose the Italien version of Joanne Harris' Chocolat and Susana whats-her-name's Like Water for Chocolate. It's a bit of a cliched Italian stereotype I suppose, but this book isn't aiming to be nitty-gritty real life, and to criticise it for not being that is to miss the point. This is a kind of fable fairy tale about one woman's life.It's not the happie
—Ape
