When we think about Vincent van Gogh, most people will instantly call to mind his iconic, boldly executed and citrus-warm sunflowers. It's a piece of brand recognition that the artist fully intended. "The sunflower is mine", he once wrote, betraying his desire to be publicly associated with this brazen, man-sized plant and its swaggering, flame-maned crown of petals. Sunflowers clearly had a deep significance for him. So what, if anything, did Vincent intend to symbolise with his beloved helianthus annuus?
Once you actually taste and smell a ripe durian, the Southeast Asian fruit best known for its penetrating odor, you will understand what all the fuss is about—and why it’s banned from some public spaces throughout the region. You may not like the taste, but you will appreciate the passion and revulsion the fruit inspires. You may also marvel at the strange ways those sentiments converge. “It has something we call hong,” a sudden smell—in this case, the aroma of “bad breath and butane gas,” said Wong Peng Ho, a Malaysian Chinese doctor and durian fanatic, as we shared a particularly pungent fruit on the Malaysian island of Penang, just off the country’s west coast. “You know how when you smell butane and you know it’s not good, but you want to continue sniffing anyway? That’s hong.” Later, sampling a fruit at a remote durian farm, Marcus Morris, a Canadian digital nomad who moved to Penang largely based on the fruit’s availability, proclaimed, “This durian has the flavor of a penny. It’s like licking a brass doorknob.” (He meant that as a compliment.)
True durian aficionados don’t just accept extreme flavors; they celebrate, savor, even exult in them. The late celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain once said of its aroma, “Try leaving cheese or a dead body out in the sun and you’re in the same neighborhood as durian.” The fruit is complex in taste and smell, varied in texture, and surprising in its effects. Flavors can span sweet, bitter, acidic, fatty and creamy, with specific tasting notes that might include cacao, blue cheese, pumpkin, or even bacon or chives. In texture, durian can resemble cheese, custard, ice cream or overripe stone fruit. Some of the most sought-after durian boasts a rare and peculiar numbing effect, much like mala peppers, used in Sichuan cuisine. The smell, which at first can evoke garbage, raw onions and garlic, seems, as you grow to appreciate durian, to shade into more positive notes such as whole milk, strong cheese and high-proof rum. Almost all desirable durian, at least in Malaysia, has fermented to the point that it has a slight or strong taste of alcohol. In short, durian contains multitudes not found in any other raw fruit or vegetable, perhaps not in any other uncooked food. (Sashimi or beef tartare connoisseurs may disagree.)
Perhaps there is more to the novel’s apparent scorn for its characters’ rural damnation. Perhaps it wants to show that the natural world’s capricious, disruptive energy gives the lie to human fatalism. Solà’s serious attention to the nonhuman makes most contemporary realist literary fiction feel narrow and timid, wilfully deaf to the other forms of life with which all human drama is interdependent.
In her introduction to the book, Kent writes “what of the generation in between – the daughters of the suffragists, the mothers of these 1970s feminists? The bright, articulate and committed women who went through two world wars, endured a massive economic depression, saw the rise of fascism and communism and so many other changes… Women who were writers during this period are the subjects of this book.”
That final line is key to understanding what this book is truly about, as while the title and blurb might suggest a deep dive into the works of women writers of the time, it instead focuses on the politics of the period that shaped these women’s every-day lives. This is also reflected in the structure of the book, which is built around dates and ideas taking on a more chronological approach, rather than having the chapters named and defined by the individual writers themselves.
Hiroshige: artist of the open road by Alfred Haft is a big and beautiful book of works by the celebrated Japanese artist Utagawa Hiroshige. Produced by the British Museum to accompany its comprehensive exhibition of the same title, this is a soothing stroll through the landscapes of Edo Japan.