(Originally published on July 15, 2011, in my blog Draupadiarjun)
The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine, originally published in German in 2010 as Die schärfsten Gerichte der tatarischen Küche, is the new novel by the young author of Broken Glass Park, Alina Bronsky. Tim Mohr’s English translation was published by Europa Editions this year.
Hottest Dishes (which is not a cookbook) is narrated by Rosalinda Achmetowna, who lives in a small Soviet Union town located twenty-seven train-hours from Moscow. Rosa’s strange encounter with love, an emotion she’d done without until then, begins when her granddaughter is born one winter night in 1978 at “Birthing Center Number 134”. Rosa names the baby “Aminat” after her own grandmother from the Caucasus Mountains. Aminat is a Tatar name. Rosa’s Kazan-born husband, Kalganow, believes in the Soviet concept of homogeneity and likes no reminders of their ethnic heritage - but Rosa usually ignores his strictures. However, even Rosa agrees that it is all very well to look Tatar, but it is disadvantageous to sound Tatar.
The mother of the baby is almost-eighteen Sulfia (“Sonja” to Kalganow), Rosa’s only child. The father remains unknown. Rosa had no idea that her daughter, whom she considered ugly and stupid, would produce such a darling infant. She is completely certain that Aminat would one day be a ravishing and extraordinarily resourceful Tatar woman (like herself). Her maternal instincts blossom eighteen years too late. She fights to have the responsibility of bringing up Aminat. Sulfia makes it easy, because she hasn’t finished growing up yet and is hardly ready to support a child or deal with her own emotional upheavals. Rosa’s often-expressed exasperation with Sulfia’s lack of beauty and brains has made the girl fragile.
The three women, Rosa, Sulfia and Aminat keep us involved in the story. Rosa ages before us, not gradually as most people do, but suddenly, devastatingly. Sulfia never does, but Aminat grows up too fast.
The story proceeds at a ripping pace. Rosa puts her politically incorrect, outrageously self-serving spin on everything and everyone, making sure there are fireworks galore on the way. Gargantua’s law “Do What Thou Wilt” is the only Rosa seems to follow. You realize the magnificence of this feat when you take into account that she is not rich, lives all her married life in two rooms of a three-bedroom communal apartment, sharing her bathroom and kitchen with Klavdia, who has the other bedroom. Though Kalganow is a minor somebody in the Soviet command structure in town, most of the time Rosa relies on her faith in human frailties to achieve her ends. Also, she does live in the Soviet Union, where laws curb free will and eventually even sugar is a luxury. Yet Rosa is extravagantly individualistic and her will, like water, always finds a way. She is never troubled by doubts. Her way is the right way, she knows best.
As a young married woman, Rosa studied pedagogy by day and cleaned a kindergarten at night. Now she has a job in a teachers’ training institution. She speaks flawless Russian and dresses fashionably thanks to cheap clothing outlets. She has a garden out of town where she grows berries and flowers. She grows tea-fungus on the windowsill of the spare bedroom (after Sulfia moves out) and can rustle up shulpa, pilaf, tutyrgan tavyk and chak chak when the occasion demands.
Aminat changes Rosa’s life. Rosa’s incredible need for Aminat pretty much wrecks Sulfia. In time, the shadowy daughter whose motivations are hard to understand, becomes very real to Rosa.
I wouldn’t like to ruin your experience of reading this story by talking about the surprises that lurk at every corner. “Hilarious”, “rollicking” are words describing the book – but it is quite as sad as it is amusing. I like the way Rosa stretches and stretches her life’s often tatty canvas, how she cleans it and embroiders it and starts all over again when it becomes soiled once more. She works hard, and never whines. She is both savior and destroyer for Sulfia and Aminat. Above all, and in the end, she pays the price for loving.
Comments