Cooking with Fernet Branca

August 29, 2005
Usually writers taking a holiday from their serious work will use a pseudonym (DeLillo as Cleo Birdwell), but British novelist Hamilton-Paterson (Gerontius
, etc.), who lives in Italy, bravely serves a very funny sendup of Italian-cooking-holiday-romance novels, without any camouflage. Written from the alternating perspectives of two foreigners who have bought neighboring Tuscan houses, the book has no plot to speak of beyond when-will-they-sleep-together. Gerald Samper is an effete British ghost writer of sportsperson biographies (such as skier Per Snoilsson's Downhill All the Way!
); neighbor Marta is a native Voynovian (think mountainous eastern bloc) trying to escape her rich family's descent into postcommunist criminality—by writing a film score for a "famous" pornographer's latest project. Each downs copious amounts of the title swill and carps at the reader about the other's infuriating ways: Gerald sings to himself in a manner that Marta then parodies for the film; Gerald relentlessly dissects the Voyde cuisine Marta serves him, all the while sharing recipes for his own hilariously absurd cuisine. Rock stars, helicopters, the porn director and son, and Marta's mafia brother all make appearances. The fun is in Hamilton-Paterson's offhand observations and delicate touch in handling his two unreliable misfits as they find each other—and there's lots of it.

September 1, 2005
This comedy of errors is set in Tuscany, an earthly paradise so overrun by Brits that they call it "Chiantishire." There, Gerald Samper ghostwrites for fading sports champions and boy-band rockers but channels his "creative talent" into cooking gastronomic abominations like mussels in chocolate, deep-fried mice, liver sorbet, and garlic ice cream with the ever-present Fernet Branca, an Italian liqueur. (Yuck!) His bucolic solitude is interrupted by new neighbor Marta, whom Gerald immediately pegs as a "dumb peasant from Mitteleuropoa who live[s] in Beatrix Potter rural squalor and pretend[s] to write music." But she's not pretending; she's scoring the latest film of world-famous Italian director Piero Pacini -and trying hard not to let her snobbish, self-serving, celebrity-obsessed neighbor meet her boss. Does the humor of this Booker Prize nominee survive the transatlantic crossing? By skewering foodie fetishes and British culinary cluelessness, it definitely has its laugh-out-loud moments of slapstick silliness, but many American readers will be baffled by poor Gerald's scatological obsessions. Not as well plotted as Julian Fellowes's "Snobs" (another recent British comedy import), but well worth a space in most collections. -Janet Evans, Pennsylvania Horticultural Soc. Lib., Philadelphia

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