A leafy forest. Two lost children. A house with gingerbread walls, roof of sugar and tempered sugar windows. A wish: devour it. This could describe one of the most popular passages in the story of in the back of this German popular story, two pillars: desire and search. The same pillars on which the plot of the book is supported Gingerbread by Helen oyeyemi (recently translated by María Belmonte for the cliff publishing house). The novel tells the story of a mother, Harriet Lee, and her daughter, lost, of an imaginary place, Druhástrana, from, whose unique recipe is magical, and a friend whom to search, Gretel Kercheval. Ingredients all of them necessary to answer many of the questions and events that the mother lived throughout her youth.
The narration runs in a network of small stories, as if they were, where the real is confused with fantasy, an imaginary scenario, perfect to put on the strings of the narrative themes such as, the search for identity, memories, family … and all this, with a good dose of irony and ambiguity. “Harriet believed that gingerbread could tell you things. Not explicitly, of course – not with words, not with phrases.
The novel requires the attention of the reader, who will also be involved in a search: that of the double senses, which goes beyond words, which is not told, what is felt and savored.
The fact that a recipe or bite serves as leitmotif To tell a story, it is not the first time you see in the so -called gastronomic narrative. In this book, Gingerbread symbolizes inheritance, mother and daughter, fantasy and mystery. Search and magic.
In the case of the book The Empress of the Ice cream, From Anthony Capella (Editorial Duomo Nefelibata) the ice cream shakes the subtramas sprinkling this period story with a good dose of seduction, challenge, desire and power. The novel introduces the reader in the seventeenth century, in the court of Carlos II of England, where the arrival of a young woman, Louise de Keroualle, with her young Italian cook, Carlo Demirco Zanetti, will revolutionize not only the royal palates but the feelings. This is a story of ambition, interests, desires and love, where gastronomy plays a fundamental role in the development of the plot: it will be the thread with which the tricks of their characters will be weaving.
In great strokes, The Empress of the Ice cream He tells the story of Louise, a beautiful young woman from the French nobility, who is sent to England to seduce Carlos II for political purposes. The Empress arrives at the Court with her chef, who will soon win the attention of the nobles for her art in the elaboration of ice cream. Thus, the novel plays with a double seduction: that of love between the Empress and the King; and that of the palates between Zanetti, the cook, and the king. Ice cream is more than a dessert, it is a symbol of power and seduction. Lemonade ice cream, apricot sorbet, green nuts rat, strawberry sorbet … The creativity of the chef has no limits and all its knowledge reflects it in the fictional THE BOOK OF ICE CREAM.
The table as a union symbol, as a place where the everyday beats, like that space of word and bite, ephemeral as the food that is served. When the Chinese writer Lu Min wrote Scene for six (Translated into Spanish by Ema Velázquez Burmester and published in Spain by Adriana Hidalgo-A.Hache) wanted to put on that table six members of two families, without great stories to tell, without further ambition than to improve their social condition. A widow, teenage children, a worker unemployed. A table where the reader will never know what they eat, because the essence of the book is not to rebel a recipe book of the early twentieth century, but to draw the economic situation of Chinese society. Thus, everything takes place in a gloomy neighborhood of an unnamed province, in a street (Shizijie) that symbolizes the crossroads of beings to which only one thing unites: the rise in life, economic progress and, therefore, success. His sharp and detailed prose leads to a reading with rhythm that to many times submerges the reader in that darkness and closure in which his characters are submerged. The main chapters discover each of the protagonists and their bland life, full of neighborhood ups and downs in search of what they are as a family, as neighbors, as strangers. Their lives enter and leave the industrial zone where nothing happens until everything explodes: “Two and forty -two in the afternoon of April 13: it is necessary to repeat this day and time because, like the other days and hours, it has nothing special. People we live doing all kinds of insignificant actions in all kinds of insignificant times. As, for example, smoking a cigarette.” And after that apparent nothing, the author reflects on the meaning of life and how far we are able to reach what is socially called success. In 2012, the novel received the People’s Literature Award award in 2012, and in 2017, it was adapted to the cinema.
