Adam Schell

Tomato Rhapsody by Adam Schell is a historical fable set in a 16th century Tuscan village. As the title suggests, the tomato is very important to this tale. In fact food is front and center throughout the book. Jewish farmer Davido grows the “love apple” with great care and love, cruel Guiseppe and his assistant Benito forage for truffles, the new village priest relishes food and spends much of his time planning his next meal. But when the stepdaughter of Guiseppe, Mari, falls in love show more with the Jewish farmer, things start to get complicated.

The story plays out much like a Shakespearean comedy which comes to a climax at the Feast of the Drunken Saint donkey race. Throughout the story, there is a puzzlement about the tomato. Although many uses of the raw fruit are described, they do not know how to successfully cook the tomato and have yet to discover the wonders of tomato sauce.

High in humor and high-jinx, the reader roots for the young lovers to find happiness and for tomato sauce to be discovered. Tomato Rhapsody was an unusual, clever and engaging story that also manages to shine a light on the oppression of Jews during the Renaissance. The story is both earthy and bawdy and an altogether delightful read. show less

Summary: Tomato Rhapsody is set in Italy in the mid 1500s, when the tomato was commonly known as the "love apple" and was distrusted and feared as being poisonous. In a small Tuscan village, Davido is a young Ebreo (Jewish) farmer who spends his days tending the tomatoes grown from seeds his grandfather stole during his voyages with Christopher Columbus. On the day that Davido and his grandfather first try to bring their fruits to market, he sees and instantly falls in love with Mari, a show more village girl whose passion for olives and olive oil matches Davido's passion for tomatoes... but unfortunately Mari's family olive groves - and Mari's future - are under the control of her cruel and scheming stepfather. Their love - like the tomatoes - are forbidden by the church, and would never be accepted by the local villagers. But some things are too sweet to be denied - whether it's the passion of young love or the flavor of a summer-ripe tomato.

Review: There have been a number of books that have come out in the past year or so that I would call "foodie fiction" - The School of Essential Ingredients and The Book of Unholy Mischief are two from my own reading that come to mind. It's a subgenre I enjoy, but I think there's been enough of an influx that relative newcomer Tomato Rhapsody has gotten somewhat lost in the shuffle... and that's a shame. It's historical fiction, yes, and it's got a very strong foodie element, but it's less of a standard historical fiction and more of a cross between a fable and an Italian commedia dell'arte. In fact, I think it bears the strongest resemblance to Joanne Harris's Chocolat - a similar theme of a bunch of resistant villagers being introduced to a new and suspicious food, a similar sense of joy at the absurdity and wonder of life and the power of food, and a similar tone of not-quite magical realism, of all of the personalities and events and reactions and emotions being more vivid and more immediate than is strictly realistic.

The prose perfectly matches the story it's telling: earthy and bawdy and joyous and full of the flavors of the Tuscan countryside. It manages to be simultaneously operatic in prose and Shakespearean (and rhyming!) in dialogue, while never taking itself entirely seriously, and the result is lyrical and lovely and so charmed by its own cleverness that I couldn't help but smile almost constantly as I was reading - at the words as well as the story.

There were a few things that bothered me. The story takes a while to get going (the young lovers don't even see each other for the first time until almost page 100), so it took me a while to really get interested. Similarly, because it's told more as a fable than as a straight-up story, we're kept at somewhat of a distance from our hero and heroine, and it's hard to become particularly emotionally involved with their plight (especially since the traditional form dictates a happy ending.) Finally, while the rhyming dialogue did definitely add a unique flavor to the book, by the end it started to get a little tiring. Still, once I was able to get settled into the rhythm and style of the story, I enjoyed it immensely, as the smile plastered across my face as I was reading probably could attest. 4 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: If you like historical fiction and/or foodie fiction (and are not thoroughly put off by bawdy humor), give Tomato Rhapsody a shot. Its style won't be to everyone's taste, but those for whom it works will find it a funny, joyful, and unique read. show less

You'll never look at tomato sauce the same way again.

Tomato Rhapsody was an extraordinary book. It's a fable about how the tomato came to Europe, and how it overcame the strange, popular prejudice that it was extremely and immediately poisonous, to become inseparable from Italian cuisine. It's also about a wicked stepfather, the oppression of Jews in early Renaissance Europe, the curing of olives, Christopher Columbus, Catholic missionaries in Africa, sanitation, copulation, and show more celebration. It's a romance (not a love story), basically Romeo and Juliet if the lovers had been older and there had been someone sensible in Fair Verona. Everything in the story has meaning and significance: a donkey's bray, a shaft of sunlight, a drop of holy water. The story is earthy - sometimes downright crude - as well as golden, rapturous, euphoric - and yes, rhapsodic. It is both sprawling and intimate, with a good-sized cast of characters who do not come across as "characters"; these are people, wildly individual and altogether real.

Some might find the rhyming dialogue cloying, or indeed nothing better than annoying. But I find that the couplets to my inner ear became as natural and simple as, dare I say, Shakespeare. (I was tempted to write an entire review in rhyme, but it would take forever; I just don't have the time.)

Read this book. But first make sure your pantry is well stocked with good olive oil, good bread, eggplant (try the Good Padre's idea in Chapter 3 – it's wonderful), fresh herbs – and tomatoes. Definitely tomatoes. Lots of them.

E cosi bello! show less

Set in Tuscany in the early 1500’s, this bawdy novel tells the story of Davido, a Jewish tomato farmer who falls in love with Mari, a Catholic olive grower, while at the same time, spinning a yarn about how the tomato came to Italy. The author animates his story with a cast of oddball characters, including rhyming villagers, a town fool, a murderous stepfather and his loyal henchman, a duke who wants to be a farmer, lusty barmaids and a priest whose skin has been dyed the purple of an show more eggplant. The book moves along at a rapid pace, with plenty of action, and witty dialogue including some veiled and not so veiled allusions to various Shakespearean works. My main quibble with the book was the author’s (in my opinion) overuse of descriptions of animal genitalia; one or two times, it was funny; ten times, it was just gross. show less