Lilla's Feast: One Woman's True Story Of Love And War In The Orient (2005) - Plot & Excerpts
For a first book, Lilla's Feast is a pretty exceptional achievement. Osborne said that she originally intended the story of her great-grandmother to be the basis for a novel, but that it was so exceptional that she felt it couldn't be written any other way. The result is a chatty, readable story of a woman's life, with all the accoutrement of tragedy, family, photographs and secrets that one would expect in a hundred-year life, played out heart-wrenchingly against the backdrop of the tumultuous first half of the twentieth century. Osborne does not hide her own partiality, frequently writing of how she felt as a girl going to see Lilla and how the events described affected her emotionally. This can occasionally grate on the reader, who doesn't particularly want to know how the author is feeling when they are following Lilla's journey themselves. In this way the book sometimes reads a little too like a genealogy story written by family, for family. But mostly the asides add to the chatty style of storytelling: it is as though we are sitting across the table from Osborne, listening to her tell the story of her great-grandmother's fascinating life. One of the best things about the story is that many of us probably have similar stories in our own family trees. This is a biography and a history written out of interest and love, not because the author was related to an important figure in history (although her next book The Bolter is something a little more like this). Possibly the most interesting way of telling history is to show the reader how it affected those who were there at the time. I occasionally got tired of the flowery food descriptions inserted into Lilla's story at strategic moments. Osborne certainly uses her imagination to full effect to give Lilla a voice where she has none anymore, winding her own impressions of Lilla's feelings with descriptions of the way Lilla used cooking and homemaking to solve problems and sort out her life. This got tiresome at times, to the point where it was obvious padding of the story. The same goes for using her cookbook as a focus point for the story - a book begun just before her internment in the Japanese concentration camp in China and written throughout her three years there. Osborne uses it as a device to guess Lilla's feelings and to reason out her actions. Ultimately, she is revealing the problem of every biographer in that, how can we possibly know what was going through Lilla's mind as she wrote it, as she hid it in a suitcase, as she donated it to a museum? On reflection, the device is a little obvious, but it still works fairly well. Lilla's story is well developed, her life outlined and filled in but not nicely resolved, as Lilla's life was not resolved. She reached one hundred years old amidst the question of whether or not she was a British subject at all. Unable to return to China, the country of her birth and the place she considered her home, she ended her life in England, surrounded by family but still feeling like a foreigner. Lilla's life, like that of much of her family and so many other ex-Empire citizens, petered out in a place that no longer had any room for them, in a pale finality without any of the glory of the Empire of her youth. In the final pages of Lilla's life, Osborne brings home the painful feelings of being adrift in a world that was totally unlike the one into which Lilla had been born.Overall, a flawed but extremely enjoyable book that draws the reader into the old world of Lilla's youth and plucks at their heart when that world crumbles away.
Review published in the New Zealand Herald, 16 October 2004Lilla's FeastFrances Osborne(Random House, $59.95)Reviewed by Philippa JamiesonImagine spending three years in a prison camp in China, held by the Japanese during World War II, with freezing winters, blazing summers and torrential rainy seasons, dwindling food rations, cramped conditions and appalling hygiene. As the starving prisoners dreamed of food, one woman in the camp typed out recipes on tissue-thin ricepaper, which were gathered into a book that is now held in London's Imperial War Museum.That woman was Lilla Eckford, born in 1882 in Chefoo, one of the 'treaty ports' of northern China, in a community of traders and missionaries, expatriate Westerners from various countries who were free from the restraints of Chinese law. Lilla and her twin Ada grew up in a prosperous business family in a world with servants, sumptuous banquets and balls. They went to a finishing school in Europe, and from their mother they learnt all the tips and tricks of cooking and entertaining.When Lilla married, fate took a turn for the worse, and her cooking skills came in handy both to appease her husband and to cope on a greatly diminished budget. The story follows her to India, and back and forth between England and China, chronicling the ups and downs of her life, her marriages, childbirth and financial fortunes.Frances Osborne has written a moving account of her spirited and determined great-grandmother. Initially I was irritated by the author's conjectures ('she must have felt' or 'she would have known'), but this feeling faded as those very speculations brought the book to life, inviting the reader to imagine the very different worlds Lilla inhabited in her 100-year life span.It did puzzle me that, although Lilla's recipes are at the heart of this memoir, only four of them are printed here, reproduced as facsimiles of the originals. But the author writes evocatively about food throughout: 'vermicelli that slithered down her throat like snakes', 'pastries… which dissolved into a featherweight crumbling crunch at first bite', or in the prison camp, 'SOS' – same old stew.Osborne has a particularly good sense of place, and has done an admirable job of placing Lilla's story in the wider context of history: the Boxer Uprising, the Japanese invasion of China, and the Communist takeover. She also gives just enough of a glimpse into herself that we can see some of her journey in writing the book and discovering her family history.
What do You think about Lilla's Feast: One Woman's True Story Of Love And War In The Orient (2005)?
I found this quite an interesting read as I don't know much about the treatment of Westerners in China in the Second World War. Oddly though (especially for me) I didn't find the author's attempts to tie in her great-great-grandmother's recipe book (written in a Japanese internment camp in China in WW2) particularly interesting, and they were overly laboured. Also, I didn't believe that the author had any concept of cooking herself! It was almost as if those bits had been written by someone else. Overally, not as well written as The Bolter by the same author.
—Kate Murphy
This is the story of an ordinary woman who lived through some extraordinary times--100 years of them! Written by her great-granddaughter, her life encompasses three countries, two world wars, three husbands (or maybe it was just two and a fiancee) and an internment camp. There are things I liked about this book and things I didn't. First the bad news: I found the author overdrawing her conclusions about how her great-grandmother might have felt at times. She was also over dramatic about it. I found myself wondering "How would she know how she felt?" The foreshadowing I felt was also overdone.A semi-negative is the view of imperialism--the actual culture of the countries Britain, America, Germany, and others occupied and the people who lived there are a back drop to the lives of the imperialists themselves. They are a footnote of little import. However, in reading Ms. Osborne's epilogue, she gave more of a nod to this and made me feel better. Perhaps she wrote the book this way to coincide with the general thinking (of the imperialist countries) of the time. Including, most probably, Lilla's.On the positive side, I did enjoy the book overall in spite of the shortcomings mentioned above. Ms. Osborne does not always paint Lilla with a favorable brush--she really is just an ordinary woman who doesn't always make the wisest decisions. But she did have an interesting life and survived some very hard times. And since I read a great deal about China, this was a very different viewpoint than I am used to.
—Pamela
I read this because Lilla was married to my great uncle Ernie Howell. A bit of a shit really as he married her for her money and then discovered she didn't have any! Consequently he was not very nice to her for quite a while. Anyway they lived in India for a while and then after he died she travelled the world ending up in China (where she was born) in the 1930s. She was imprisoned by the Japanese during the war and had a pretty awful time. So her story is interesting but Frances Osborne's style leaves a lot to be desired - a bit gushing. The book is full of 'I can see her now....', ' I can just imagine her.....', 'she must have felt....' - very irritating. I shan't read another one by her.
—Vivien
