Blood, Bones, and Butter

Sometimes when I read a book I know others will enjoy, I simultaneously realize there is no way I can explain it in a way that piques their interest as it should. Gabrielle Hamilton's memoir Blood, Bones, and Butter is just such a book. To say the book is about food, while true, is also an understatement.

The author grew up in a family where food was central. She opens with her memories of the book outdoor lamb roast her father organized and carried out each year. Even her accounts of her pure delinquency when her mother left and she and a brother remained behind--basically alone--don't prepare the reader for the woman who develops.

Hamilton didn't end up with her own restaurant Prunes in New York City after going the traditional route--culinary school. In fact, after having to complete high school and college in a nontraditional setting, she earned a MFA in fiction writing from the University of Michigan, "the Harvard of the Midwest." She learned everything she knows about the food industry the hard way, from the bottom up.

She started out waiting tables, prepping for huge generic catered meals, tending bar, even underage, finally landing in her spot as owner and chef by following anything but a logical business plan.

And that is only part of the story. Hamilton married an Italian (an Italian Italian-from Italy), the father of her two sons, and went with him each July for three weeks in Italy with his family, going from Rome to their summer villa in the South, then back. These vacations not only provide rich materials for food writing but such introspection and awareness of family dynamics.

Hamilton's rich use of imagery, of figurative language might slide by a reader not mining for such, but would land smack in the subconscious, prompting one to mull over just why this book is so evocative and provocative. I'll admit that I had to figure out how to add notes and highlights to my eBook so I could return to some of the most powerful passages. For now, though, I think I want to cook some eggplant.

Blood, Bones, and Butter

Out Stealing Horses

Do food metaphors apply to reading experiences? Some leave a lingering taste; some I can't stop nibbling. Some leave me empty, still hungry, but not necessarily for more of the same. Some are feasts, like the picnic I enjoyed in Napa Valley with my husband and friends perhaps 17 years ago, but which my senses still recall vividly. I notice that sometimes the books that I read more slowly, the ones that don't have rip-roaring, page-turning action, tend to linger longer in my head. Others that move quickly with narrative momentum fade more quickly.

This past week, as I read Per Petterson's novel Out Stealing Horses, I found the reading slow, especially in the beginning. The novel is structured so that it moves back and forth between the present, in which the protagonist Trond is in his sixties, to 1948 when he was in his early teens. He also learns details from events in his father's life a few years earlier when the Germans occupy Norway (the setting of the novel). Much of the story takes place inside his head in fact, and many questions are never answered in the story, yet the more I read, the more I felt compelled to keep reading.

The satisfaction came in the way the author wove certain subtle threads through the novel, including the one with which he finishes the book. Nothing about the book is didactic or heavy-handed. There really are no bad guys in the book (even the German soldiers are revealed sympathetically as young boys who under different circumstances would not be considered evil or frightening.) Bad things do happen, though, through the course of the story--an accidental death, apparent adultery, abandonment by a parent. In the course of the story, though, he reveals how this boy (who is actually an older man through much of the book) became a man.

Out Stealing Horses