La Cucina

Lily Prior

I can't remember where I saw this title recommended but it sounded like the kind of fiction likely to appeal to anyone interested in Italian settings. The plot summaries were promising enough. Rosa Fiore suffers a tragic loss and spends the next twenty years mourning and cooking in equal measure until, middle-aged, spinsterish and the best cook in Sicily, she meets a mysterious stranger. The stranger, known only as l'Inglese, is in Sicily to research a cookbook. While Rosa teaches l'Inglese about Sicilian food, l'Inglese reawakens Rosa's long dormant sexuality. The two share a randy, greedy summer until one day l'Inglese disappears as suddenly as he appeared leaving Rosa once again to cook her way out of her misery. Only at the end of the book is the key to the mystery revealed.

It ought to be a feast of a book. The cover is beautifully done. The blurb on the back promises a rich, intense and sensuous read. It's just a pity it stinks so badly. It's quite possibly the worst book set in Italy I've ever read. Lily Prior has clearly spent time in Sicily and has done her research into its cuisine but she can't write for toffee. I can only assume the publishers thought they'd ride the current wave of gastrolit (is that right word?) and rush out an Italian version of Joanne Harris's Chocolat as soon as they got their hands on this rubbish.

The paragraphs which should have been the strongest of all - where Rosa is in her kitchen furiously baking and bottling - are some of the deadest pieces of food writing ever to get into print. I love to cook when I'm troubled and I pine for my kitchen if I go 24 hours without cooking but nothing about Rosa's frenzy is believable. It _is_ possible to devote pages and pages to describing one night of baking and make it compelling (the first chapter in Jeffrey Steingarten's The Man Who Ate Everything is proof of that) but Lily Prior is nowhere near a capable enough writer to carry it off.

I could stomach the poor food writing if it was set in an Italy I could recognise. It is not. The Sicilian cliches come so thick and fast it would be hard to list them all. A father kills his own son over a matter of honour in a silly and stagy scene. The men are all either mafiosi, mysterious and all-knowing, or dull, half-witted farm-hands. The women are all hussies and gossips as well as instinctively superb cooks. We're asked to believe Rosa is so traditional and primitive that she thinks menstruation is caused by eating too many artichokes. On top of the cliches the author tosses in some characters and scenes which are either supposed to be engagingly grotesque or weirdly funny. They're neither. Top of my list was the scene with the priest masturbating in his confessional box as he hears Rosa's confession.

Nor can Lily Prior do plotting or dialogue. The plotting is chaotic. The dialogue is weak throughout the book but it's at its worst near the end when one of Rosa's brothers returns from Chicago. Is it meaningful to render the speech of an Italian, speaking (presumably) in Sicilian dialect with a slight American accent, by suddenly abandoning grammar? Is that supposed to represent his American twang? Ferggoodnessakes. And where's the logic behind occasionally peppering the text with Italian words? When there are no English equivalents, as in Sicilian dishes or ingredients, fine. Otherwise, silly. Using words like "chiesa" or "fattoria" ("church" and "farm", in English) only serve to remind us that the author is too lazy to write local colour the hard way.

OK, I've ranted long enough. Here's an extract, no more and no less than a typical paragraph:

"For dessert he smeared my breasts with gelati and a sauce of raspberries. Ooooh, it was cold! As a garnish he placed individual raspberries in the mounds of ice cream so that it looked as though I had many nipples and it was impossible to tell which were the real ones and which were not."

Impossible to tell? Truly? And it was cold, was it? Puh-lease ...