The Word "Desire", Rikki Ducornet (365 Books, Day 72)

sovay mentioned liking one of Ducornet's novels, so I got a book of hers out of the library. This is a collection of short stories themed around the concept of desire, specifically erotic desire, though she does not always define either word in the traditional manner.

This book does something very interesting, and I'm not quite certain whether it works for me: for every single one of these stories' protagonists, the self and the object of desire are the only things that are real, and the object of desire is very consciously the Other. Which is to say, the protagonists are prosaic and people and have to cut their toenails and so on, and everything else is exoticized as hell. I noticed this because there was a story that was set in India, and I was starting to growl at the way it was all-surface India, all of these huge bright cliches and a white guy at the center looking for weirdness, and then I realized that the story wasn't doing anything any different from the previous ones, which had done identical lacquered not-seeing-the-real-thing versions of the south of France and the interior of a marriage and, in one case, the protagonist's niece. I think the author is making the point that people who are blinded by what they are looking for are going to seize the things they consider exotic and make those things into part of what they're looking for, but, hmm, it would have been nice to get more of an outside deflatory perspective sometimes on those things the protagonists consider exotic about which there are already active cultural exoticizing narratives.

Mind you, sometimes there are, one of my favorite moments in this entire book is when one protagonist's father announces that he is going to go to Ethiopia, convert the natives to evangelical Christianity, and build a factory that makes carbonated coffee, and the protagonist's mother laughs so hard she has trouble seeing the divorce papers as she signs them and refers to him for the rest of the story as 'that idiot'. I appreciated that moment. Could maybe have done with a bit more of that.

But the point of it all is the way desire can cheat itself and the way it can Other, so I think this is a valid form. And it's beautifully done, ridiculously pretty prose that usually stays the right side of purple and a redeeming thread of total vulgarity, the baroque and Gothic tinsel layered over whatever particular madness the narrator not necessarily expresses, but is. It's complicated, multivalent, structure-heavy, surprisingly easy-to-read work and I enjoyed it immensely; it is not the sort of book I come away from wondering whether it is any good, but rather embroiled in a long and complex argument as to whether I agree with it in any direction, and if so which one. (Probably I don't. But it's an interesting argument.)

And, unusually for a short story collection, there are here no stories I point at as particularly better or worse than the others, though the title story may have been just a shade weaker. It's very consistent in what it is doing. Ducornet is a writer I will certainly read more by, especially as in terms of sheer liking it's one of the more congenial things I've read so far (your mileage may, of course, vary).

The Word "Desire", Rikki Ducornet (365 Books, Day 72)

sovay mentioned liking one of Ducornet's novels, so I got a book of hers out of the library. This is a collection of short stories themed around the concept of desire, specifically erotic desire, though she does not always define either word in the traditional manner.

This book does something very interesting, and I'm not quite certain whether it works for me: for every single one of these stories' protagonists, the self and the object of desire are the only things that are real, and the object of desire is very consciously the Other. Which is to say, the protagonists are prosaic and people and have to cut their toenails and so on, and everything else is exoticized as hell. I noticed this because there was a story that was set in India, and I was starting to growl at the way it was all-surface India, all of these huge bright cliches and a white guy at the center looking for weirdness, and then I realized that the story wasn't doing anything any different from the previous ones, which had done identical lacquered not-seeing-the-real-thing versions of the south of France and the interior of a marriage and, in one case, the protagonist's niece. I think the author is making the point that people who are blinded by what they are looking for are going to seize the things they consider exotic and make those things into part of what they're looking for, but, hmm, it would have been nice to get more of an outside deflatory perspective sometimes on those things the protagonists consider exotic about which there are already active cultural exoticizing narratives.

Mind you, sometimes there are, one of my favorite moments in this entire book is when one protagonist's father announces that he is going to go to Ethiopia, convert the natives to evangelical Christianity, and build a factory that makes carbonated coffee, and the protagonist's mother laughs so hard she has trouble seeing the divorce papers as she signs them and refers to him for the rest of the story as 'that idiot'. I appreciated that moment. Could maybe have done with a bit more of that.

But the point of it all is the way desire can cheat itself and the way it can Other, so I think this is a valid form. And it's beautifully done, ridiculously pretty prose that usually stays the right side of purple and a redeeming thread of total vulgarity, the baroque and Gothic tinsel layered over whatever particular madness the narrator not necessarily expresses, but is. It's complicated, multivalent, structure-heavy, surprisingly easy-to-read work and I enjoyed it immensely; it is not the sort of book I come away from wondering whether it is any good, but rather embroiled in a long and complex argument as to whether I agree with it in any direction, and if so which one. (Probably I don't. But it's an interesting argument.)

And, unusually for a short story collection, there are here no stories I point at as particularly better or worse than the others, though the title story may have been just a shade weaker. It's very consistent in what it is doing. Ducornet is a writer I will certainly read more by, especially as in terms of sheer liking it's one of the more congenial things I've read so far (your mileage may, of course, vary).

You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there.

Good Eating: Suggestions for Wartime Dishes, The Daily Telegraph (365 Books, Day 73)

This is a lot of the Daily Telegraph's World War II-era recipes, collected and organized. As a result, it's an interesting look at wartime British cookery and the way that recipes adapted to rationing, and probably not at this point in time to be used as an actual cookbook.

One thing that I note is that some ingredients that were evidently common are not, in fact, common to me. This may be an across-the-ocean thing as opposed to time period, I'm not sure; but fresh redcurrants are both seasonal and very expensive anywhere I've lived, fresh damsons unheard of (damson jam is mad expensive too), fresh loganberries right out; and apparently rabbit was a cheap meat. Oh, and suet. I have cooked with suet precisely once in my life, this time that eredien and I were using a pudding mold she had, and it had to be special-ordered. It is so assumed in this book that one knows how to make a suet crust that they do not bother with a recipe. And I think we have sultanas in this country under the name 'golden raisins' but they are not remotely standard.

On the other hand, of course a great many ingredients were incredibly scarce, and I was interested to notice which ones: dairy, certainly, most dairy, these recipes invariably use margarine and dry milk and something called 'household milk' which seems to be liquid but is distinguished from fresh, and there are many more uses for sour milk than one usually sees in a cookbook. Cheese seemed fairly plentiful, though, it's a staple here. Eggs-- everything here is with reconstituted dried egg. There's a section on how to make most egg dishes with dry ones, including how to fake hard-boiled egg for the center of a Scotch egg, how to fake scrambled eggs (with a helpful note that scrambled eggs are President Roosevelt's favorite food), how to do Yorkshire pudding with dried egg and dry milk. Many cuts of meat seem to have been prohibitively expensive, so they recommend you pot-roast everything, and make a Sunday joint by rolling a flatter piece jelly-roll style and stuffing it with forcemeat. Much fruit seems to have been around, except for some reason lemons, which were so dear that there's a recipe here for lemon curd using margarine, dried eggs, saccharine tablets and pounded lemonade drink mix powder.

There's also a fake marzipan made of almond flavoring and soybean flour, which actually doesn't sound that bad to me.

( Many of the recipes here don't sound that bad, in fact. )

Good Eating: Suggestions for Wartime Dishes, The Daily Telegraph (365 Books, Day 73)

This is a lot of the Daily Telegraph's World War II-era recipes, collected and organized. As a result, it's an interesting look at wartime British cookery and the way that recipes adapted to rationing, and probably not at this point in time to be used as an actual cookbook.

One thing that I note is that some ingredients that were evidently common are not, in fact, common to me. This may be an across-the-ocean thing as opposed to time period, I'm not sure; but fresh redcurrants are both seasonal and very expensive anywhere I've lived, fresh damsons unheard of (damson jam is mad expensive too), fresh loganberries right out; and apparently rabbit was a cheap meat. Oh, and suet. I have cooked with suet precisely once in my life, this time that eredien and I were using a pudding mold she had, and it had to be special-ordered. It is so assumed in this book that one knows how to make a suet crust that they do not bother with a recipe. And I think we have sultanas in this country under the name 'golden raisins' but they are not remotely standard.

On the other hand, of course a great many ingredients were incredibly scarce, and I was interested to notice which ones: dairy, certainly, most dairy, these recipes invariably use margarine and dry milk and something called 'household milk' which seems to be liquid but is distinguished from fresh, and there are many more uses for sour milk than one usually sees in a cookbook. Cheese seemed fairly plentiful, though, it's a staple here. Eggs-- everything here is with reconstituted dried egg. There's a section on how to make most egg dishes with dry ones, including how to fake hard-boiled egg for the center of a Scotch egg, how to fake scrambled eggs (with a helpful note that scrambled eggs are President Roosevelt's favorite food), how to do Yorkshire pudding with dried egg and dry milk. Many cuts of meat seem to have been prohibitively expensive, so they recommend you pot-roast everything, and make a Sunday joint by rolling a flatter piece jelly-roll style and stuffing it with forcemeat. Much fruit seems to have been around, except for some reason lemons, which were so dear that there's a recipe here for lemon curd using margarine, dried eggs, saccharine tablets and pounded lemonade drink mix powder.

There's also a fake marzipan made of almond flavoring and soybean flour, which actually doesn't sound that bad to me.

( Many of the recipes here don't sound that bad, in fact. )

You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there.