Cooking with Fernet Branca

Gerald Samper, Englishman, has bought a house in Camaoire, Italy, seeking warmer weather and peace and quiet in which to write. His neighbour, Marta from Voynovia somewhere in the former USSR, has bought the neighbouring house in order to write the musical score for a film being shot by the famous director Pacini. The story alternates back and forth between the two. Alternates? Ricochets, more accurately.

Gerald swans into the novel first, instantly establishing himself as a bitchy queen with an enormous ego but with the credentials to back this up (although not the bottom he thinks he has), as a very successful ghost writer for the ‘autobiographies’ of rich and famous sports stars. He fancies himself an experimental, cutting edge show more gourmet cook with a beautiful tenor voice. He is a ghastly cook with a warbling falsetto. I didn’t flinch at the first recipe, mussels rolled in Valrhona dark chocolate and deep fried in olive oil with rosemary and soy sauce. But once he and Marta discover Fernet Branca between them, and Gerald begins adding it to everything, the recipes get wilder and more fantastical, featuring everything from a neighbour’s noisy daschund to smoked cat. “Add 1 ½ eggs” he sings. Half an egg? And so they go.

Marta is the daughter of a Voynovian mafia don, fleeing the compound of her father’s love and protectiveness, as well as the isolation of Voynova, to make her mark on the musical world. With her wild frizzy hair occasionally smattened down with bear grease and Voynovian food which almost matches Gerald’s for bizarre, she is the perfect target for the latter’s scorn but Marta too has her credentials in place and is a bona fide musician.

What ensues is one of the funnier books I’ve read in a long time, laugh out loud in the chiropractor’s office and have everyone look at you kind of funny. Whether Gerald is describing a mad dash to an outhouse in Peru or dealing with a UFO believing rock star, Hamilton-Paterson nails it all the way through. The refreshing thing is that there is something of an actual story in here as well, with characters (in every sense of the word) whom we come to understand as individuals, not thin pastiches designed only for a laugh.

The recipes are insane. (“...the single drop of paraffin...I have discovered that this single drop transforms the dish from merely very interesting into an unblushing classic.”) The situations are madcap. (“Down there is the world as run by a handful of corporations, an army of lawyers and millions of religious zealots. It is not a place that has a niche for Gerald Samper. Up here, thank goodness, I needn’t pretend to be a member of the human race at all and can remain minimally contaminated by its germy lies. (Yes! You recognized it! Another anagram of Lyme Regis.) I can enjoy my cold trifle of sweetbreads - tripe and blueberries were made for each other - and a glass or three of Barolo while thinking peacefully anarchic thoughts.”) The anagrams of Lyme Regis are the perfect descriptors of twitchy obsessive compulsiveness. (“It’s the only way I know how to write the world - or scribe my globe, if I want an anagram of Lyme Regis Cobb.”) The timing is perfect and the comedy spot on, whether sardonic or Pythonesque.

I understand that there are sequels, which is almost too bad, because this was complete and done like a dinner as it was. I can't imagine how anything further could need to be said. show less

Gerald Samper, an effete English snob, has his own private hilltop in Tuscany, where he wiles away his time working as a ghostwriter for celebrities and inventing wholly original culinary concoctions-including ice cream made with garlic and the bitter, herb-based liqueur of the book's title. Gerald's idyll is shattered by the arrival of Marta, on the run from a crime-riddled former soviet republic. A series of hilarious misunderstandings brings this odd couple into ever closer and more disastrous proximity.

Hilarious. Simply hilarious.

A Englishman buys a house in the mountains of Italy seeking quiet for his writing. He sings arias while he invents the most bizarre recipes, the products of which he sometimes shares with his aggravating neighbor, a woman from Voynovia, who generously shares bottles of Fernet Branca with him. She claims to be a musician and composer in town to compose music for a film by a famous Italian director.

Their experiences of living as neighbors differ depending on who does the narration, which gives the reader the opportunity to see both sides. Humor aside, what's clear is our culture colors impressions we form of people from countries we are unfamiliar with and these impressions are often false once we get to know show more the other person better or start to share a language with which to better communicate.

What this book is full of is humor and crazy capers. It's pure entertainment. show less

"Cooking With Fernet Branca" by James Hamilton-Paterson is part of oddball publisher Europa Editions's sinister plot to make Murrikins like me aware of the strange and sinister world of lit'rachoor published beyond our shores. Muriel Barbery owes her Murrikin presence to them, too. We all know how *that* turned out....

Well, before moving any farther along in this review process, let me send out the call: Does anyone know how to get hold of (wicked double entendre optional) actor John Barrowman? You know, Captain Jack Harkness of "Torchwood" fame? He is literally missing the key to Murrikin stardom by not reading, optioning, and making this book into a movie. It suits every single national prejudice we have: Eastern Europeans as sinister show more lawbreaking peasants who eat strangely shaped, colored, and named things and call them foods (like Twinkies, Cheetos, and Mountain Dew are *normal*); Englishmen as dudis (you'll have to read the book for that translation) who do eccentric off-the-wall things with food that are repulsively named and gruesomely concocted (spotted dick? bubble-and-squeak?); and Italians as supercilious effete cognoscenti of world culture, who possess the strangest *need* for vulgarity.

The characters in this hilarious romp are the most dysfunctional group of misfits and ignoramuses and stereotypes ever deployed by an English-language author. They do predictable things, yet Hamilton-Paterson's deftly ironic, cruelly flensing eye and word processor cause readerly glee instead of readerly ennui to ensue. The whole bizarre crew...the lumpenproletariat ex-Soviet composer, the Italian superdirector long past his prime, the English snob who refers to Tuscany's glory as "Chiantishire" and "Tuscminster"...gyrates and shudders and clumps towards a completely foreseeable climactic explosion (heeheehee). And all the time, snarking and judging and learning to depend on each other. In the end, the end is nigh for all the established relationships and the dim, Fernet Branca-hangover-hazed outlines of the new configurations are, well, the English say it best...dire.

Read it. Really, do. And I dare you not to laugh at these idiots! Don't be put off by the sheer hideousness of the American edition's cover, in all its shades-of-purple garish grisliness. The charm of reading the book is that one needn't look at that...that...illustration...on the cover, but inflict it on those not yet In The Know enough to be reading it themselves.

And seriously...John Barrowman needs to know about this. Pass it on! show less

Gerald Sampler is an Englishman planing to hide in his quiet house in the NW corner of Tuscany to ghostwrite autobiographies of minor celebrities, mostly sports figures. Upon his arrival, he meets his newly arrived neighbour, Marta, who has escaped from "one of those vague ex-Soviet countries," where her family still lives and appear to be involved in organized crime. She composes film scores for a ....colourful .... Italian film director. Gerald and Marta clash. Gerry sings loud opera, badly, while creating outrageous recipes that involve something savoury, such as sardines, and something sweet, such as butterscotch. Endless combinations. Some of them include dubious and illegal ingredients, such as otter and Jack Russel terrier. And I show more learned early on the "Fernet Branca" is a disgusting herbal spirit (which I'm sure my Italian father-in-law made me sample once) that both characters drinking frequently. Silly me, on reading the title, I assumed Fernet Branca was a person.

Very clever satire, mocking the fantasy "memoirs" such as Under the Tuscan Sun and A Year in Provence, and pretentious books about gourmet cooking, and satirizing a zillion other things as well.

Way too many entertaining passages to quote, but if I have to pick one, I'll share his comment on Jane Austen: "Even the witty old fag-hag Jane Austen started one of her incomparable novels--was it Donna?--with the telling sentence 'It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a good man in possession of a wife must be in want of a tidy fortune.' And there you have it, memorably expressed."

Cooking With Fernet Branca was nominated for the 2004 Booker Prize. There are two sequels: Amazing Disgrace and Rancid Pansies, which I will eventually track down.

Recommended for: People with a sense of humour and who know a lot of stuff. Hamilton-Paterson packs the narrative with obscure details and goes off on many a tangent. Lots were outside my scope of knowledge and didn't mean much, but all the ones I understood were hilarious. If you're one of those people who take pride in being outside everyday culture -- especially 2004 from a Brit male POV, this novel will be gibberish. Otherwise, if you like clever, fun books, I highly recommend it. show less

Thanks to the New York Times Book Review and the usual bounty of books for Christmas, I always seem to run into a great streak of reading early in each calendar year.

This book continued the streak started with The Lost Painting. It even tied back to the Italian setting of that book, though this is a completely different effort. This novel is an intelligent farce revolving around British author Gerald Samper, a writer of second-rate biographies (tripe about race car drivers and boy-band singers) who obtains a villa in the Italian countryside to stir his creative juices. This creative streak is displayed in the vilest fashion, as he is forever offering us the most disgusting recipes imaginable: mussels in chocolate, fish cake complete show more with icing sugar, smoked cat, and so forth. These become increasingly execrable and almost always are spiked with a rotgut liquor called Fernet Branca.

Samper’s culinary bliss is disturbed when he discovers his next-door neighbor, Marta, who he pegs as a semi-literate and drunken psycho. Just when you’re tempted to buy in to this description, the point of view shifts to Marta, and we get her very slanted view of her new neighbor. Many amusing moments and running jokes ensue. It’s kind of like a somewhat twisted travelogue novel and very entertaining. show less

I was out in San Francisco with my husband and a friend and I saw Fernet Branca on the drinks memu. I asked the server about it and she admitted that she knew next to nothing about it, never having tasted it herself. I ordered it anyway, thinking of this book sitting on my shelves as I did so. My husband, even used to my quirks, was nonplussed by the fact that I was ordering an unknown drink based entirely on the title of a book I had not yet even read. To my mind, Fernet Branca tastes a little bit like cough syrup. So not exactly a drink I'll be ordering again any time soon. Luckily the book was significantly better than the drink and I would happily revisit Hamilton-Paterson's works again and again.

This novel is an hilarious send-up show more of those moving and starting over travel narrative memoirs where an ex-pat moves to an exotic (usually Mediterranean) locale, restores a marvelous home, gently mocks the eccentric natives, and cooks fabulous meals with fresh local produce. Gerald and Marta are ex-pat neighbors in a small Tuscan hill village but that is where the similarities to the typical travel narratives stop. Gerald is a bit of a fussy, curmudgeonly Englishman who ghostwrites memoirs for the rich and famous (and often dissipated). He has retreated to this out of the way place so that he can write in peace and quiet. Marta is a seemingly stodgy Slav from the former Soviet-block and just about everything about her offends Gerald's sensibilities. That she is also a composer working on the movie score for a famous director's film seems to him to be a fabrication of vast proportions. But as each others' closest neighbors, they cannot escape each other and must exist in an entertaining disharmony.

The narration alternates between Gerald and Marta so that the reader has the opportunity to see all of the comic misunderstandings and assumptions from both eccentric characters' perspectives. Gerald is certain he is a cook of the highest calibre and his inventive if positively ghastly dishes are all included with the text (and contain copious amounts of Fernet Branca, hence the title). Marta seems to egg the prissy, easily offended Gerald on, but she has her own quirks as well. The situations in the novel go from mundane to beyond far-fetched but by the time they get completely unbelievable, readers are already so entertained by the novel that they just laugh harder, thoroughly enjoying the ride. Witty, clever, delightfully sarcastic, and satirical this was a blast to read and I'm looking forward to the next one. show less