The Taste of Things, a film by Anh Hung Tran

What a beautiful film! Every frame is sumptuous, steeped in a different time. The background is not a musical score but ambient sounds: a woodpecker, a peacock screaming, birdsong, and naturally the sounds of cooking – searing, boiling, chopping, stirring, assembling. We see patience, timing, meticulous attention to every detail, creation of complex sauces and rich dishes. All this occurs in the kitchen of a country manor owned by Dodin (Benoit Magimel). He is a “Napoleon of cuisine” according to his friends, four men who join him to dine. But the love of his life, his cook, is Eugenie (Juliette Binoche), the genius behind the food, in yet another role in which she fairly glows with inspiration and joy. 

They have a bountiful kitchen garden, neighbors, open land where hunters provide the birds of different seasons – the dappled grace of the French countryside. It is an idyll unmarred by invented conflict. Because of the film’s calm demeanor, we see depth of love expressed through cooking, a shared breakfast, a stroll in a sunny meadow. The drama of creating remarkable food is all the thrill we need – we only wish we could take our places at the table when the friends gather to dine. 

The only thing that made no sense to me was – no bread? My introduction to French food was my husband working the oven at a French bakery, hauling over a thousand baguettes out every night. To me, these crackling-from-the-700-degree-oven loaves are the epitome of French food. But there was not a baguette in sight, nor a batard. The closest we get is a boule filled with vegetables in a dense sauce – but the boule is more packaging than a food in its own right. How is this possible? 

I wept at the end. Perhaps this was due to the beauty and richness of long-developing love – or maybe it was the evocation of my own long-term love, of a man with whom I share the pleasure of good food, especially French, and the creativity manifested in the making of marvelous soups, roasts, fish in cream sauce, the meticulous efforts going into the perfection of each flavor, coaxing its finest form from every ingredient.

The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy

This lyrical novel, winner of the 1997 Booker Prize, explores love as an outpost in a hostile world, occupied in the understanding that it cannot survive the siege – of law, of hierarchy, of propriety, of obedience. The story is revealed slowly, descending through layers, in the eyes of twins, a boy, Estha, and a girl, Rahel, whose father is gone and whose mother, Ammu, lives at the mercy of in-laws who despise her. They live in a poor village in a poor province of India, and from the outset we know that something terrible – more than one thing – has occurred, scarring their lives. 

It takes till nearly the end to fully see those hateful and mournful ghosts, the love not permitted crushed under the bootheels of the intolerance that keeps society in order, order in society. In sensory detail, Roy offers the observations of children, true to their dramatic and playful sensibilities. When the twins are seven, their ten-year-old cousin, half-English, comes to visit with her English mother. During this short visit, the girl dies, though it takes most of the novel for us to find out the true circumstances. 

But in the opening chapter, we are with Rahel in church during the funeral, observing, “… Rahel watched a small black bat climb up Baby Kochamma’s expensive funeral sari with gently clinging curled claws. When it reached the place between her sari and her blouse, her roll of sadness, her bare midriff, Baby Kochamma screamed and hit the air with her hymnbook. The singing stopped for a ‘Whatisit? Whathappened?’ and for a Furrywhirring and a Sariflapping.” 

This book has made it onto Banned Book lists, not only for brief sexual content but also for the more explosive exploration of love between an Untouchable and a middle-caste woman. Roy deals frankly with social structures and the pull of desire, and it seems likely that the condemnation assailing this work has more to do with the violations of caste, than erotic content. 

She also lays bare the privileges of patriarchy – the twins’ drunken grandfather who beats their grandmother daily with a brass candlestick, the assumptions of the local Marxist leader that his wife will clean him up and clean up after him, available whenever he wants her and out of sight when he doesn’t. 

As with Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, there’s a good chance those who seek to ban the book have never actually read it, they’ve just heard something about it, or seen a brief quote. I found the novel both honest about the harm we do to each other, and well-written. Read it then judge for yourself.

The Plague of Doves, by Louise Erdrich

This complex 2008 book has more characters than a Tolstoy novel. It is not one story but multitudes, with narrators of different generations, whose experiences intertwine and haunt and goad each other. Some are Native Americans, some are German or French immigrants, in a lonely section of North Dakota where reservation land borders failing small towns. Family trees interlock and divide and plunge skyward and earthward in a confusion the reader could either diligently list, or just flip back through to see which maimed branch this orphaned brother, this obsessed banker, belonged to. 

Or you could just read it for the stories, as rich and abundant as any Salman Rushdie could conjure – a violin that saves a hell-bent young man; a grandfather with many versions of how he lost half an ear; a baby that survives the murder of her entire family in an act that reverberates through the book; a preacher so swelled with spirit that none can withstand him – and more. Love affairs and vengeance and waywardness, the whole range of humanity with our fixed notions of the world, who cannot recognize what we’re doing even as we push it to its dreadful end, crowd its pages. 

Some of Erdrich’s work has plot. This one focuses on a place and its people; as with lives anywhere, plenty happens but not in furtherance of a tale so much as spinning out events and years, creating deep impressions of prairie and its inhabitants. As readers of Erdrich would expect, her characters span the spectrum of bigotry, intolerance, and delusion while tottering on the edge of absurdity, slowly releasing their secrets onto the page.

Jack, by Marilynne Robinson

What a beautifully-written exquisitely-felt story this is! Jack, ne’er-do-well son of Iowa preacher John Boughton, is living in St. Louis in the 1940s. He is past middle age, solitary, with some genteel aspects alongside his troubling ones: he has read widely, poets and novelists, and plays piano, is naturally courteous. Alongside these qualities he is a petty thief, inveterate liar, a drunk and a bum: a man on the run from responsibility in all its forms. He scrapes by, pawning items he has stolen, finding marginal jobs – shoe salesman, dance instructor. His brother, who has his address, sends him money sometimes. 

He meets Della Miles, a younger black woman, English teacher at the good colored high school. One night they are locked in a cemetery – she came to leave flowers, and before she realized, the gates were locked. He came there to spend the night, as he sometimes did when he was too broke to rent a shabby room. Through the long chilly night they have a conversation as they walk around stealthily, not to draw the attention of the guard. 

Their fathers are both preachers: Jack’s Presbyterian, Della’s a Methodist bishop. Despite strict segregation and the disapproval of society, this pair find in each other kindred spirits. And they fall in love. This is the love of two people who know they only trouble each other’s lives, yet cannot keep apart. The God they may or may not believe in holds them in the palm of his hand, where they share loyalty and comfort in the face of a world of opposition. 

Robinson’s profound insights and well-crafted sentences bring us into the heart of their lives and predicaments. “She had repaid his kindness with kindness. As she would not have done if she had known who he was. What he was. When defects of character are your character, you become a what. He had noticed this. No one ever says, A liar is who you are, or Who you are is a thief. He was a what, absolutely.” 

“Downstairs were a barbershop, a failed lawyer’s office, a dentist’s office, the office of an accountant. Jack knew, because he knew such things, that there was hardly anything worth stealing. The dance studio was an empty room, in which even determined malice could hardly be up to much.” 

She writes so gently about them. Though it’s clear the world is poised to slap them down, you feel how blessed they are, this unlikely love their bulwark against an unkind future. I need not say more. Any thoughtful person will deeply appreciate reading this book.

The Forsyte Saga, by John Galsworthy

Every winter I read a big thick book. This year I chose The Forsyte Saga, which is actually three novels, linked by two short interludes.  The first volume, The Man of Property, was published in 1906, and the final book, To Let, in 1922. The saga is the history of an upper middle class English family whose older generation’s births spanned 1799 to 1820. These ten siblings, a selection of their children, and theirs, are the characters, in scenes set from around 1890 through the early 1920s.

“[Forsytes] are...half England, and the better half too, the safe half, the three percent half, the half that counts. It’s their wealth and security that makes everything possible; makes your art possible, makes literature, science, even religion, possible. Without Forsytes, who believe in none of these things, but turn them all to use, where should we be? My dear sir, the Forsytes are the middlemen, the commercials, the pillars of society, the corner-stones of convention; everything that is admirable.”

In The Man of Property, Soames Forsyte is the epitome of the breed: quiet, snobbish, cold, proper, self-disciplined, possessive. Therein lies the tale. In his youth he meets a beautiful young woman, Irene, and determines to make her his wife. Through persistence he succeeds - but then she realizes she does not love him. To him, she is his most shining possession. To her, he is a jailer - the sumptuousness of her prison means nothing to her.

Irene meets a Forsyte cousin’s fiance, an architect, with whom attraction is immediate and profound. Soames engages the young man to design a house for him, and Bosinney, in consultation with Irene, builds the expensive lovely house, Robin Hill, in a bucolic spot not far from London. But Bosinney and Irene fall in love. He breaks his engagement, she breaks her marriage vows, he dies in an accident and she shuns Soames, who, repulsed by the thought of publicity, does nothing. They live separately, without communication, still married.

The first interlude follows: Indian Summer of a Forsyte, about the last years of Old Jolyon, Soames’s uncle. A great connoisseur of beauty, he buys Robin Hill, a purchase which at the time suits Soames, who hates the house but averts a scandal by not having to advertise it. Old Jolyon provides Irene money to live on, and wills her a generous stipend. He warms in her presence, and reconciles with his own son Jolyon (whose daughter was the architect’s fiancee) and his two children by his second wife.

Now the second novel, In Chancery, opens (chancery is court - the title refers to Soames assisting his sister in her divorce from her drunken spendthrift husband, and Soames finally pursuing his own divorce from Irene). Jolyon the younger, a watercolorist and also a great appreciator of beauty, is a complete anomaly in that acquisitive family. Eventually this Jolyon finds his way to Irene. Soames, by now older and desirous of an heir, finds her still so beautiful that he entreats her to come back and father a child for him. She repudiates him. At last he presses for divorce, to marry a young Frenchwoman he does not love, who bears him a daughter. In an ironic twist, Irene and Jolyon move to Robin Hill, where they have a son.

So ends the second volume. Now we have the weakest section of the book, the mercifully short Awakening, a treacly flight of fancy in the mind of Irene and Jolyon’s son Jon at age eight or nine.

The final book, To Let, opens with Jon and Fleur, Soames’s daughter, both nineteen, meeting by chance. Their cousin and his wife (first cousins to each other, in one of the durable love matches in the saga) host Jon at their country place, where Fleur comes to visit.  The two young people fall in love. Irene and Soames are both appalled by this liaison - the ugliness of their parting will not allow either to make rapprochement for their children’s sakes.

That’s the bare bones of the story. What makes it fascinating is, on the one hand, Galsworthy’s way of plunging the reader into a time and place foreign to us, but guiding us skillfully. Here’s what the Forsytes think of Bosinney’s death:

“In their hearts they would even feel it an intervention of Providence, of retribution - had not Bosinney endangered their two most priceless possessions, the pocket and the hearth?”

On the other hand, the full tale has the symmetry of a composition by Bach - parents who have no use for each other, children who fall in love. They neither lead their elders to reconciliation, nor go as far as Romeo and Juliet to tragic ends. And we see the importance of beauty and love in society - Jolyon wins Irene by gentleness, and by allowing her whatever freedom she wants. Soames, who clenches onto things and people, estranges his young second wife -

“He knew that she knew that they both knew there was no love between them, but he still expected her not to admit in words or conduct such a thing, and he could never understand what she meant when she talked of the hypocrisy of the English.”

His only concern when she has an affair under his very nose, is its effect on his adored daughter: his daughter, he thinks of Fleur, not theirs.

Lest you think Soames a monster or a buffoon, you should read this trilogy - he is so fully developed and so thoroughly human that to scorn him is to scorn ourselves. The possessiveness that is his undoing is a family trait - he is only the most perfect manifestation of it. What he wants to possess is beauty - in addition to Irene, he amasses a formidable collection of paintings, which he chooses with an eye to resale value but nevertheless appreciates while they are his. When he visits the last member of his father’s generation - Uncle Timothy, now a hundred - he reflects that the house should be a museum, for it is a perfect representation of the bygone Victorian world. Every object, adornment, custom in the house exists in a backwater untouched by anything more recent than the Boer War. Yet Soames perceives that these furnishings that meant so much to his childhood have no value in the modern world.

Copious notes assembled by Geoffrey Harvey in the Oxford World Classics edition (1995) illumine Galsworthy’s references, enriching the story for a modern audience.

Step out of time - immerse yourself in a world better and worse than our own.