book double feature: blood, bones and butter + behind the beautiful forevers

check out all those b's above. that is a beauitful bunch of baby b's.

the first bounty of b's is blood, bones and butter by gabrielle hamilton. it is one-half true-life account of one woman's journey to become a celebrity chef and one-half the crazed ramblings of a woman of striking out against the world. the first half is really very good. it is an honest account of the hard work that goes into running a kitchen and how unglamorous and ugly cooking can be, despite how cooking blogs and tv try to present that world. unfortunately the second half she decides to write an extended rant against her italian husband and how mean he is for introducing her into the world of italian villas and big gracious italian families. she has an annoying knack for playing both the superior cultural elite and hapless victim. the book ends with her finally finding happiness by exchanging her lovely, worldly mother for a slightly more exotic one.

behind the beautiful forevers genuinely shocked me. it was not so much the content of the story, which was genuinely shocking, but the fact that it was a work of non-fiction. i clearly did not know much about the book before i started reading it but, in my defense, it was written in the guise of a fiction. the author went inside the head of the characters. action happened seemingly in real-time. people, places and events had a larger than life literary bent to them. i was happy to accept it as a perfectly good account of poverty and tragedy in india, one of many these days. and then i hit the afterward in which the author explains the research, how she lived with these people, these real people, places, events and how she tried to accurately convey everything she witnessed in the preceding pages. it seemed fictional because it was a stylistic choice and i think a smart one. the fact that it was revealed only afterward to be a true life account made it all the more visceral to me. it was a beautiful depiction of a life with many unhappy endings and truly only the tiniest slivers of happy ones.

books: eclipse

what is the term for this kind of book? literary fiction? how do you define literary merit and then apply that objectively to a book? well anyway, i think most people would agree this falls into that category. capital "L" literature. its a book about the human condition. about suffering and being haunted by the past and by ghosts and an actor so devoted to his roles that he never took the time to understand his true self. i suppose anyone who avoids that sort of self-examination is bound for a breakdown sooner or later and sure enough that is what happens to story's protagonist.

the writing is composed of dense descriptive paragraphs full of weighty vocabulary. time is never at a constant and as confused as the narrators thoughts. it is a book where not much happens but much is written about what does and how the past is coded in everything. overall a good book with good passages and good words but not a book that will leave a great impression on myself.