Madame Bovary is a food novel: food echoes itself across the narrative, and Flaubert uses food to highlight the characters bourgeois angst. However, Flaubert’s use of food is almost antithetical to the way food is used in contemporary literature and writing. Modern food writing is all about recreating the meal, the experience of eating. On the other hand, while there is so much food in Madame Bovary–nobody seems to eat! Well, except for Charles. Poor, hungry Charles. The only time we, as readers, see Emma eat, to truly exist in the moment of consumption, is when purges, or when she commits suicide by ingesting poison.
Almost a millennium before the Rosetta Stone was even discovered, Arabic scholars had begun to grapple with the hieroglyphs they found on Egyptian monuments and tomb paintings. The highly pictorial method of writing was first developed about 3250 BC and known in Egyptian as "divine words" and in Greek as "sacred carving" or "hieroglyph". Although it had ceased to be used by the 5th Century AD, these medieval scholars believed that the script could still be deciphered, and the secrets of the inscriptions revealed.
Imagine you go to a zoology conference. The first speaker talks about her 3D model of a 12-legged purple spider that lives in the Arctic. There’s no evidence it exists, she admits, but it’s a testable hypothesis, and she argues that a mission should be sent off to search the Arctic for spiders.
The second speaker has a model for a flying earthworm, but it flies only in caves. There’s no evidence for that either, but he petitions to search the world’s caves. The third one has a model for octopuses on Mars. It’s testable, he stresses.
However perverse it may sound, that death party — as my sister and I came to call those five days — remains one of the most profound experiences of my life. For a brief moment, at my grandfather’s party, I got to slow down the inevitable, to be with the people I grew up with, in the place we held sacred and dear. Amid that joyful reverie, I had time to sober up and confront the simple reality that my grandfather wanted to die and that everything would change. I saw that the man who had commanded movie sets and TV crews now rarely left his house. That his sweaters hung loose on his stooped shoulders, and that his rosebushes withered with neglect. That things were already changing, whether I was ready for it or not.
Despite the fact that she is our first-person narrator, Agnès, too, knows that her inner dreamworld is hidden, and chooses to keep much of it that way. This is what makes The Book of Goose demand a careful, incisive reading. The pleasure lies in seeing, obliquely and incompletely, glimpses not of the stories she tells, but of the secrets that she keeps.
During the year I lived in France, I read Annie Ernaux insatiably. For months, I returned to the library to get her books, one copy after another. Faced with the loneliness of living abroad, I threw myself into reading. Into Ernaux. I liked the way she juxtaposed a detached style with intimate stories. Those stripped-down sentences gave me an easy way to practice French. At the same time, her autobiographical books offered me the space to see my own life anew. When I finally got to Se Perdre (the French title of Getting Lost, translated by Alison L. Strayer), I recognized my own aimless obsession for Ernaux’s books in her insatiable desire for her lover. With both of us turned inward, I recognized this driving force behind her writing: obsession. To understand the past, to keep it close in order to make sense of the present.
“Have you ever walked between two great big airplane hangars and it made you feel very small and very strange?” the art dealer Richard Bellamy is said to have asked. “Well, that’s minimalism.”
There are no airplane hangars in the Zambian American writer Namwali Serpell’s second novel, “The Furrows,” and the tone isn’t spare. But the book is so laden with odd convergences and there are so many brushes with demons that it does leave you feeling tiny and weird.
At heart, though, it’s a big, rewarding puzzle that casts a jaundiced eye at one of London’s historic heydays while slipping the reader a flask full of Jazz-Age thrills under the table.
The best-selling Korean writer Kim Hye-jin’s first novel to be translated into English, “Concerning My Daughter,” begins with an awkward question. Eating udon noodles with her mother, a 30-year-old daughter asks if she and her girlfriend, Lane, can move into the mother’s house. The daughter (who is only ever referred to by Lane’s nickname for her, “Green”) can’t afford a flat of her own because of her unpredictable work as an “itinerant” university lecturer. The mother — our narrator, also unnamed — agrees reluctantly, needing extra income to supplement what she earns caring for dementia patients. She also recognizes that her only daughter needs help, even if that means helping Lane too, whom the mother despises on principle because she is not a man. The mother wrestles with her disapproval of her daughter’s life choices both in private and with her patient Jen, a successful and well-traveled woman who never had children, and now has no family to care for her.
Where the sequel surpasses the original is in how the author keeps faith with the reader’s emotional intelligence on abstract notions of memory and culpability. In Election, the characters are too self-aware, too insightful when it comes to their own ethical shortcomings; they call themselves out so we don’t have (or get) to. Tracy Flick Can’t Win offers no such moral clarity. Here, the novel’s multiple points of view underscore just why closure remains out of reach.