A quick summer reading update:
I suspect that many of you would enjoy Richard C. Morais' The Hundred-Foot Journey which follows a young boy from bustling Mumbai to rural France (with a short stop in London) and thence to Paris. Not only does it offer the delights of armchair travel and entertaining characters, but it folds in the sensory pleasures of the culinary world as we follow the central character's climb to the top of the toughly critiqued Paris restaurant scene. My mouth watered as the pages described the lively, colourful, brilliantly spiced Indian food woven into a compelling multi-generational story of rags, riches, political violence, loss, and survival. And again, as the family adapts to life in rural France, a different set of foods seduced me as I visited the local markets with one or the other partner in a hilarious rivalry between old-school, xenophobic culinary French tradition and an upstart immigrant who hopes to transform the landscape with an injection from another continent.
Morais also includes some illuminating narrative commentary on the pressures restaurants face in these days of globalized capital, and he clearly reveals his biases against some of the labour code protections that seem to work against restaurant owners. Caught up in the narrative, entertained by its characters, engulfed in its ambiance, I couldn't help but be sympathetic to some of the argument, yet having family in the industry, I'm much more appreciative than Morais seems to be, in these pages, to the value of job protection, a decent wage, etc. In fact, reading this immediately after Eva Hornung's Dog Boy, I wondered how I could reconcile such different worldviews. . .
In the end, I suppose the way I manage is by not so much reconciling these different paradigms, but identifying the elements I'm not comfortable with and enjoying the rest of Morais' book. Is that a copout? Perhaps, but I will readily admit that I enjoyed the novel very much, and I suspect you will too. Let me know, will you?