The World of Interiors is essentially a decorating magazine, but this is like saying Vogue concerns itself with sewing. It showcases seemingly every facet of the decorative arts and crafts over centuries, from the pop artist Roy Lichtenstein’s Manhattan studio to an antique dealer’s 16th-century Shropshire pile to a shepherd’s hut, while reviewing books like “The People’s Galleries: Art Museums and Exhibitions in Britain 1800-1914.” It’s intelligent, witty and wide-ranging in its curiosity: a bible.
And a rarity.
To this day, I often think of that distant silver head in a spotlight, blurry, so far away in the dark auditorium. I drove home that night, happier than I’d been in years, reciting what lines I could remember in my head. I had a glass of wine. I sat down to my typewriter, and as I often did at the time, rolled in a sheet of paper, and typed away at it, just for the sheer glorious sound of the clacking keys.
In the last years of the 19th century a small part-Sioux girl was musing on the wide world about which she was learning at school. “In some of the countries,” she wrote, “the people have very strange ways, and are very queer themselves.” By 1930 that girl, Ella Cara Deloria, had been commissioned by Columbia University to return to the Great Plains to investigate the ceremonies and beliefs of her father’s people. She made a note – one that could be read as a reproof to her own childish self. She was to remember that people outside the dominant culture were not “queer” – just different. “Get nowhere unless prejudices first forgotten. Cultures are many; man is one. Boas.”
Boas was Professor Franz Boas. To Charles King, author of this illuminating biographical history of the then new-fangled study of “anthropology”, Boas was the founder and wise steersman of the science, and an indefatigable advocate for the important concept that one of his protégées was to call “cultural relativity”.
Christmas dinner, when you’re the one cooking it, is an oddly spiritual gesture. It’s not just roast meat and spuds on a plate, like any other Sunday. It may look just like it, give or take a blob of cranberry, but Christmas dinner is imbued with memories. Oh, and hopes, dreams, love and loss, too. All the good, emotionally churning stuff that pairs well with a glass of brandy.
Great chefs are mysterious. They work miracles behind a swinging kitchen door, saying little, piquing our curiosity. And why not? They have the skill to transform what we eat, play with our tastes, change what we think food can be. In the right hands, an artichoke or tomato becomes sweet enough for dessert. A tough cut of meat melts in the mouth.
The woman at the heart of Marie NDiaye’s new novel is known to the reader only as the Cheffe, a “recently minted” French word meaning female chef. The book’s translator, Jordan Stump, notes that “no good English equivalent exists.” And maybe a new word is necessary, as few could adequately describe this woman, if she ever let anyone know her well enough to try. The closest she has to a confidante is her former kitchen assistant, our narrator, who loves her fiercely and unrequitedly. He tells the story of her life in rambling sentences, questioning himself often, and occasionally losing touch with what may or may not be true.