Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love
by Lara Vapnyar
Published by Pantheon
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Reviewed by Wendy Hines
In a triumphant return to the short story form of her extraordinary debut with There Are Jews in My House, Lara Vapnyar gives us a delightful new collection in which food and love intersect, along with their overlapping pleasures, frustrations, and deep associations in the lives of her unforgettable characters.
Each story invites us into the uniquely captivating private worlds of Vapnyar’s Eastern European native land. Even though Lara Vapnyar learned English only after immigrating to the USA in 1994, her writing is tasteful and vivid. Sprinkled with humor and the benevolence of humankind, this slim volume is a page-turner.
The first story, “A Bunch of Broccoli on the Third Shelf,” opens with a vegetable lover named Nina who has recently arrived from Russia. Nina connects with food preferably to those around her. The descriptions of the vegetables make the reader sense them, the smell of them and the feel of them. The colorful abundance of the vegetable markets in New York represents her own fresh hopes and dreams. When Nina’s husband leaves her, Nina’s sister rummages through the refrigerator and remarks: “You’ve got the whole vegetable graveyard in here.”
In “Puffed Rice and Meatballs,” Katya yields to the whims of her lover in pillow talk. He tries to engage her in a discussion about the horror of communism but she changes the subject and recounts her first sexual experience to him instead. When she was in preschool, a young boy wanted to play “I’ll show you mine and you show me yours,” and she vividly recalls children eating from plates piled high with meatballs, countering the notion of food scarcity. Later at home, drinking dark tea and dipping into a jar of walnut jam, Katya finds the jam “too sugary and wrong.” She’s disgusted with herself and her story.
The journey ends with a handful of recipes, and her recipe for lethally fatty meatballs comes with a warning: “If you need to kill yourself or another person and don’t mind that the process will be slow and painful, here is the recipe.” These stories are remarkable for the twists and turns of emotions they evoke in a reader.
“They champed, they crunched, they jingled their forks, they clinked glasses.”
Armchair Interviews says: The volume may be slim, but the characters are full of depth and vitality. Its like having dessert before dinner, very indulgent, yet satisfying.