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It is 1895. Robert Wallis, would-be poet, bohemian and impoverished dandy, accepts a commission from coffee merchant Samuel Pinker to categorise the different tastes of coffee - and encounters Pinker's free-thinking daughters, Philomenia, Ada and Emily. As romance blossoms with Emily, Robert realises that the muse and marriage may not be incompatible after all. Sent to Abyssinia to make his fortune in the coffee trade, he becomes obsessed with slave girl, Fikre. He decides to use the money he has saved to buy her from her owner - a decision that will change not only his own life, but the lives of the three Pinker sisters...… (more)
I call it Lawrence of Arabica. Such a brew of coffee, romance, sensuality, and history. Great turn of phrases. This novel has everything I look for in an English novel. ( )
I enjoyed learning about the cupping of coffee, but didn't care for the sexual descriptions included in the book. Time ran out before I read the whole thing. Probably won't check it out again to finish. ( )
This turned out to be a surprisingly good book. The story itself has a lot of twists and turns with love, death, adventure and a lot of info about coffee. The main character is witty over all it is well written. ( )
“Just as good coffee might smell of – perhaps – leather and tobacco and honeysuckle, all at once, so love is a mixture of any number of feelings: infatuation, idealism, tenderness, lust, the urge to protect or be protected, the desire to ravish, comradeship, friendship, aesthetic appreciation, and a thousand more besides. … The laugh of a woman, the scent of a child, the making of a coffee – these are the various flavors of love.”
Robert Wallis is an aesthete who wishes to write poetry. Samuel Pinker is the owner of a coffee business who recognizes a particular talent in Wallis and hires him to compile a guide to the various flavors of coffee, thus beginning a long relationship between the Pinker family and Wallis.
It would not be a Capella novel without an element of love and romance, and this book certainly has that. However, I thought Capella lost track of the main romantic thread. He flirted with the reader, much as the two young people flirted, then seemed to completely lose interest. I quickly grew irritated by Wallis’s continued immature and hedonistic behavior. As a result, I became much more interested in the history of the coffee trade, and the behind-the-scenes machinations of the powerful men who sought to control the world market. Then Capella brings back the love interest. I had greatly enjoyed his debut novel, The Food of Love (a retelling of Cyrano de Bergerac), but this novel isn’t quite as flavorful. ( )
I didn't finish this book. I want to know what happens, but I don't want to read it right now. Other books kept cutting the line, and it was hard to go back to this one. I will make it to-read, and try again at another time.
Yesterday a drop of semen, tomorrow a handful of spice or ashes - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Dedication
First words
Who is he, this young man who strolls toward us down Regent Street, a carnation in his collar and a cane in his hand?
Quotations
Oh, that smell . . . The building held over a thousand sacks of coffee, and Pinker kept his big drum roasters going day and night. It was a smell halfway between mouth-watering and eye-watering, a smell as dark as burning pitch; a bitter, black, beguiling perfume that caught at the back of the throat, filling the nostrils and the brain. A man could become addicted to that smell, as quick as any opium.
Day by day I became more confident in my judgments, more precise in my terms. I seemed to enter a state of synaethesia, that condition in which all the senses become interlinked, so that scents become colors, tastes become pictures, and all the stimuli of the physical world are felt as strongly as emotions.
The only consolation are the sunsets, the most glorious I have ever seen. The moon rises first, through a bank of mist that covers the mangroves like a layer of tracing paper: a blood-orange orb that seems to change shape as it rises, elongating as it separates from its reflection in the oil-black river. On the other side, the sun sinks down into the mist, touches the water and bursts. Flushes of gold, amethyst, carmine and violet color the sky,and then those, too, fade into the darkness, leaving only the dazzling frost of the moonlight and the utter blackness of the swamp . . . Oh, and a million small flying creatures that instantly come and bite your skin with all the ferocity of piranhas.
Sometimes he referred to stocks and shares, and other more esoteric forms of contract, as financial instruments. It was an apt description: he was like nothing so much as a musician, or a conductor, beckoning great symphonies of cash flow into existence with a perfectly timed wave of his hand.
The juncture of her legs was the altar at which I knelt, the cup at which I made my communion.
It is 1895. Robert Wallis, would-be poet, bohemian and impoverished dandy, accepts a commission from coffee merchant Samuel Pinker to categorise the different tastes of coffee - and encounters Pinker's free-thinking daughters, Philomenia, Ada and Emily. As romance blossoms with Emily, Robert realises that the muse and marriage may not be incompatible after all. Sent to Abyssinia to make his fortune in the coffee trade, he becomes obsessed with slave girl, Fikre. He decides to use the money he has saved to buy her from her owner - a decision that will change not only his own life, but the lives of the three Pinker sisters...
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Book description
Robert Wallis is een berooide levensgenieter in het 19e-eeuwse Londen. Hij wordt verliefd op Emily Pinker, de dochter van een steenrijke koffie-importeur. Hoewel Robert een natuurlijke affiniteit met koffie lijkt te hebben, vertrouwt Samuel Pinker hem niet helemaal. Hij stuurt Robert naar het donkere hart van Afrika om de meest zeldzame koffiesoort ter wereld te vinden. Pas als hij deze opdracht vervult, mag hij met Emily trouwen. Al snel laat Robert Emily achter in Londen en dompelt hij zich onder in een levensgevaarlijke wereld van onvoorstelbare duistere schoonheid. Het slaven meisje Fikre zal uiteindelijk zijn toekomst bepalen en de vraag beantwoorden of de prijs van koffie soms niet veel te hoog is...
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Wikipedia in English
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Such a brew of coffee, romance, sensuality, and history. Great turn of phrases. This novel has everything I look for in an English novel. (