The simplest way for me to put it is that I thoroughly enjoyed this novel. It is a biting balance of humor and darkness, vitality and insight, story and voice. It was with surprise when I realized that The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine spans a full thirty years: 1978-2008. The voice of the prose is so immediate and immersive, it lures you wholly into what is before you. The edges before and beyond blur.
Wait, did I say the 'voice of the prose'? Scratch that -- it's the voice of Rosa Achmetowna, a Soviet matriarch who begins the novel in her forties. She is fierce, manipulative, hilarious, cruel, loving, intelligent, arrogant, and utterly unreliable. It is Bronsky's gift that she is able to craft such a comprehensive first-person vantage for Rosa and still communicate to the reader what Rosa doesn't see (or want to see) -- this is the source of much of the novel's humor, as well as its dissonant horrors.
When the novel opens, Rosa lives with her husband, seventeen-year-old daughter Sulfia, and a nosy roommate in a communal Soviet apartment in an unnamed town that is twenty-seven train hours from Moscow. Sulfia has confessed to becoming pregnant, though she insists that it was a dream that impregnated her. Rosa doesn't question her "stupid" daughter but goes right to work in trying to end the pregnancy. Despite her best efforts (one involving a mustard-bath), a girl is born -- one that shares Rosa's Tartar features. Rosa falls for the child, who she calls Aminant although Sulfia has named her Anja. And then Rosa promptly kidnaps the child, insisting that she'd be a better mother to Aminant and alleging to others that Sulfia is too brain-damaged to be a caretaker.
Indeed, Rosa's damning narration about "scrawny" and "moronic" Sulfia makes one cringe. The story propels forward into multiple marriages for put-upon Sulfia, an increasingly provoking and intriguing Aminant, and a Rosa who will leverage a pedophile's interest in twelve-year-old Aminant to get the three generations of women to Germany. The Soviet Union collapses in this novel, but it somehow happens backstage, behind Rosa's self-centered point-of-view, and her entertaining storytelling. It is quite a literary trick: you loathe her, you love her, you admire her formidable resourcefulness and resiliancy, you want her to be held accountable for the harm she causes, and you simply can't stop paying attention to her, and the world that she has cooked up.
The final act of The Hottest Dishes took several surprising turns, bringing with them crucial space for this volatile novel to air out with real vulnerability. Bronsky might've pushed more in this direction, and risked more emotional complication. All the same, I finished the novel feeling moved. In the quiet of the night and the lamplight, I almost reached over to pick up another book I'm reading ... and then I stopped. I wanted to sit with this story awhile longer.
This is the second novel by Russian-born Alina Bronsky, and her second translated from the German by Tim Mohr for Europa Editions. (Bronsky emigrated to Germany when she was thirteen; she writes under a pseudonym.) Bronsky's debut novel, Broken Glass Park, was nominated for the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, one of the most prestigious European literary prizes. For his part, Tim Mohr won the Three Percent award in 2007 for his translation of Dorothea Dieckmann's Guantanamo. He is a former Berlin DJ who now makes his living doing literary things from New York City.
Europa seems to know it's struck gold with Bronsky; it featured this title over the summer as its 100th published book. The Hottest Dishes stands out as a contemporary title in translation -- published by an independent press, no less -- that has been thoroughly well reviewed in both traditional and non-traditional publications. Yet another reason to feel good about this remarkable book.
Related:
- My video review of Broken Glass Park
- Speaking: Alina Bronsky
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