About a decade ago — after an adult sleepover — I had my first bites of okonomiyaki, in a man’s walk-up apartment not far from Osaka’s Namba train station. I’d only just gotten used to the city’s drowsy mornings. My chef, an older guy with even sleepier eyes than mine, had seemingly every ingredient but the one he was looking for, grumbling as he chopped, stirred, ladled and fried our batter. But everything he did have went into the pancakes. And every bite tasted like something else — unexpected.
In her letter to early readers, Zhang notes that this novel was composed after her first post-lockdown restaurant meal, the experience made holy in its long absence. This reverence is clear in Land of Milk and Honey, and wholly relatable. The novel is, at its best, both a love letter to food and a prescient warning of capitalist catastrophe to come, and the juxtaposition ultimately succeeds.
It’s a truth not often-enough acknowledged that Mavis Gallant is a wonder of the literary world, even if many of that world’s biggest names have declared her just that. John Updike, for instance, said her “talent is as versatile and witty as it is somber and empathetic.”
If you’ve not read her yet, it won’t hurt to start with her nonfiction. And what luck: “Paris Notebooks,” a superb collection of her essays, reviews and journal entries has just been reissued.
I got the feeling, over those 430 pages, not of interrupting my life by reading it but understanding what it means to interrupt a book with a life. And in this sense the book comes to life in a way none other has for me — not a thing to be consumed but a force exerting its own energy on me.