Culture Watch
Page Three
The Hundred-Foot Journey
By Richard C. Morais © 2008
Published by Simon & Schuster; ©2010, 245 pp.
It's enjoyable to find a story told in a layered way. This one reads so convincingly like a memoir that the reader is tempted to forget that it really is artful fiction. It could also be a non-academic dissertation of food with implications of the intimate connections between who we are and what we are accustomed to eating.
We meet Hassan Haji in Mumbai (Bombay), to which his village-raised grandparents had moved from a peasant existence so far from the teeming, half-Anglicized city of 1934, even their grandson reveals his surprise that they not only survived, but managed to thrive. They knew how to cook, and food made the Haji family rich, in part thanks to World War II.
Flashbacks show the kind of difficult life of the extended family and their work ethic. We are treated to descriptions of pleasures of the kitchen that made young Hassan remember that they had been happy.
When Hassan's mother dies, his volatile, emotional, canny father decides to move to England. He thereby throws his six children and the extended family into an environment to which they couldn't adjust. From the landlord to the city, nothing fits. Morais's pictures of Indian immigrants in London are vivid and painful.
Still mourning, filled with undirected energy and hope for something better on the Continent, Haji senior again uproots them all, takes off in an aging Mercedes, and deposits them in a small town in the south of France. These scenes of displacement, pathetic as they are, are leavened with humor, albeit slightly on the dark side.
In a small town in southern France, with the Juras looming in the background, is where the hundred-foot journey begins. Across the street from the eccentric venue Mr. Haji chooses for his new venture sits an aged, up-scale, highly respected, traditional French restaurant.
No one In Lumière can understand how a flamboyant group of non-French-speaking Indians can have imagined they could make a living. Not only are these people setting up shop so close to their competition, they immediately savage the sensibilities of the conservative, proper French in general, and the chef of Le Saule Pleureur (The Weeping Willow) in particular. Mm. Mallory proves to be a forbidding woman of enormous talent and determination, and she is only a hundred feet away.
The developing plot involves conflicts both physical and psychological between the two eating establishments and their proprietors. Without giving anything away, it will probably not surprise any reader to be following the kid who helped his family in kitchens from India to England, to France on his way to a pinnacle of culinary success in Paris.
One blurb claims that mouth-watering descriptions of food will doubtless make a reader want to eat the book struck me as overblown, primarily because so much of what is offered up is so unfamiliar as to be without particular appeal. Further, some may object to a little too much information about butchering. A gourmand will doubtless appreciate the classic French cuisine and its variations that make Hassan a master, but unless one is conversant with Indian cooking, the subtleties in that field won't mean much other than to emphasize its astonishing variety.
Marais spins a wonderful yarn, in part because of the exotic (to most Americans) settings, in part because of his ability to make characters appeal in spite of their failings. In the end, it is the most desirable and most universal human virtues that triumph. The reader comes away from a veritable banquet.
©2010 Joan L. Cannon for SeniorWomen.com
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