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Title: The Fly-Truffler: A Novel by Gustaf Sobin ISBN: 0-393-04832-2 Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: January, 2000 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (8 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Demanding
Comment: This is a short little book that reads more like poetry than prose. I found the experience of reading this book a little like visting a museum of contemporary art -- you know it's got to be good, but you also sense that much of it is over your head. It's worth reading, but don't expect a light read -- it's short, but very dense and challenging.
Rating: 3
Summary: Touching but Out of Touch
Comment: Many readers will think this book is a beautiful fable. Perhaps they are right, and perhaps I am too literal a reader, but I have difficulty being charmed by a novel in which nobody can be both content and alive. Mr. Sobin writes very well (if somewhat repetitiously--he becomes attached to certain adjectives and then uses them endlessly), and his use of Old Provencal is fascinating, but the book left me with a hangover. It was an intoxicating experience, but one that lingered in unpleasant ways.
Rating: 4
Summary: Black Diamonds
Comment: Truffles can be said to be an obsession if only for the prices that people will pay to have them. Caviar is an inexpensive snack by comparison, I don't know what other product of Mother Nature competes. Part of the mystique that continues to surround this delicacy are the ways by which they are detected, and their elusiveness. In, "The Fly Truffler", the role of these buried treasures are an obsession, grantor of dreams, and ultimately destructive.
A professor loses the love of his life but he is not allowed the normal release that grief, mourning, and time allow. He finds that as he continues the elaborate ritual from detecting the tiniest insect clues, to the digging, and the ritual of bottling the truffle with eggs for days before eating, he dreams, without fail of his lost love. The metaphors that surround his activities are many, not the least of which is his digging of individual truffles from the ground that holds what he has lost, and their ability to offer a bit at a time an intensifying second chance relationship. His former mate appears to him and becomes increasingly aware of his presence and then tempts him with information she must share. The problem is that only the truffle can bridge this gap between his world and hers, and truffles are rare at the best of times and are present for only a portion of the year. A period that is maddeningly short as he is tormented by these nocturnal trysts.
An all consuming love can destroy a person's real world when all the participants are still amongst the living and can act as a painful reminder and tempting target for reconciliation or even retribution. In this tale there is no opportunity for either and the author takes apart this man's world with the same efficacy and devastation, even as he is alone. A love for one of nature's offerings becomes his obsession, as he attempts to unnaturally continue another love that nature has taken, what is gone, irrevocably.
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Title: The Debt to Pleasure: A Novel by John Lanchester ISBN: 0312420366 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 01 November, 2001 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: From Here, You Can't See Paris: Seasons of a French Village and Its Restaurant by Michael S. Sanders ISBN: 0060184728 Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Pub. Date: 05 November, 2002 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent ISBN: 0440136482 Publisher: Dell Publishing Company Pub. Date: 01 January, 1983 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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