Guinness Lit

 

I’ve written about bathroom lit and comfort lit, but now, in honor of Saint Patrick’s Day, it’s only natural that I discuss one of my favourite topics: Guinness Lit (actually, a subgenre of the latter category), aka the kind of book that goes well with a pint of “the black stuff” and will get you in the mood to celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day in high literary style. For example, I began declaiming Yeats’ poem “Easter 1916″ this morning, while G. read me some of her favourite play, Translations, by Brian Friel. It was awesome. Oh, and she wants me to make my Irish culinary specialty, soda bread. 

Ireland has one of the most impressive literary traditions in the world: it has produced no less than four Nobel Prize laureates (can you name them all?*) and many of the most important writers of the last 300 years, such as Jonathan Swift, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, J.M. Synge, James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Sean O’Faolain William Trevor, John Banville, Anne Enright, and Colm Tóibín… Not bad for a small island with a population of under 7 million (the Republic has 4.5).

Four years ago, when I had just turned eighteen, I went backpacking around the Emerald Isle for a month and fell deeply in love with it. What struck me about Dublin, especially, was how steeped it was in its rich literary history. I spent nearly all my time there visiting places related to famous Irish books and writers: the Dublin Writer’s Museum, the National Library (with its stunning exhibit on Yeats), the Abbey Theatre, the Chester Beatty Library, the Marsh Library, the Book of Kells and Long Room in Trinity College. I also went on a literary pub crawl and visited countless bookshops—Catach Books and the Winding Stair probably being my top two. Even the Gravity Bar, at the very top of the pint-shaped Guinness Storehouse, features glass walls with quotes from Irish texts describing different parts of Dublin. I love one on Trinity College, from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “The grey block of Trinity on his left, set heavily in the city’s ignorance like a dull stone set in a cumbrous ring…” New to the world of Irish letters, charmed by what I discovered, I soaked all of this in and bought myself a copy of Ulysses in the James Joyce Cultural Center (they’re behind the Bloomsday celebrations that occur every June). For the rest of my trip, I plodded through the book’s labyrinthian beauty (I got about halfway through, and understood maybe half of that).

The Statue of James Joyce, just off O'Connell Stree, in Dublin

Inside The Winding Stair bookshop.

Really, there is no better way to celebrate Irish culture on Saint Patrick’s than by reading something Irish. I personally suggest a short story (although I must admit I’m biased because that’s what I’m writing my undergraduate thesis on, so my head is filled with them); the form is often recognized as a particular speciality of Irish writers (critics believe this is because short stories tap into the rich tradition of gaelic oral tales). Irish short stories are still very much appreciated—as attested, for instance, by the publication of the Granta Book of the Irish Short Story last year. Suggestions? Frank O’Connor remains the master for me; he writes moving and simple portraits of Irishmen and women. Try “The Cornet Player Who Betrayed Ireland” and “Guests of the Nation” (you’ll find them both in the Penguin mini modern classics series), which explore the human implications of politics. My favourite of O’Connor’s remains “My First Protestant,” about a man’s disillusionment concerning religion and Catholic-Protestant strife.  There are lots of other great Irish short story writers. Joyce’s “The Dead” is a classic, as is Elizabeth Bowen’s “Summer Night” and Sean O’Faolain’s “Midsummer Night Madness,” although my favourite of his is “The Lovers of the Lake,” about two headstrong middle-aged lovers who discover the depth of their relationship by doing a pilgrimage to Lough Derry. For something more modern, check out Colm Tóibín’s “A Priest in the Family” (from his collection Mothers and Sons), a pitch-perfect story about a case of Catholic sex abuse, from the point of view of the mother.

What Guinness lit are you going to pick up today?

*W.B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, and Seamus Heaney.

A Feast of Reading

Cheers to xelgend.blogspot.com, where I found this awesome image!

Other than books and reading, one of my great interests is food. I like to eat, I like to cook, I like to watch cooking shows, learn how to cook new things, go to the restaurant, try new foods, and plan meals. It was only natural that, at some point, these two passions — reading, eating — would intersect. My literary-cum-culinary obsession has nothing to do with cookbooks or bibliophagy; rather, it’s an interest in food as described within books. I’m always intrigued, and sometimes fascinated, whenever food is mentioned in a novel or a story — even if only in passing — and I often feel a deep urge to taste whatever the food in question is.

Here’s an example. In the beginning of A Moveable Feast, Hemingway’s memoirs of Paris in the 1920s, Hemingway goes to a café to write. He orders a plate of oysters and a glass of white wine. He describes eating “the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture.” This wonderful passage is the reason why I began eating oysters. Hemingway is great on food, by the way. Among my favorite of his culinary passages is the description of the rabbit cooked with onions and red wine in For Whom the Bell Tolls, and raw tuna Santiago eats while he’s out on his boat in The Old Man and the Sea: “He picked up a piece and put in his mouth and chewed it slowly. It was not unpleasant. Chew it well, he thought, and get all the juices. It would not be bad to eat with a little lime or with lemon or with salt.”

"Still Life with Oysters", by Gustabe Caillebotte (1881).

My interest in food description in books began when I read Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events as a child. In one of the books, I think it was The Ersatz Elevator, something called salmon puffs are featured during a reception. Salmon puffs. They weren’t described in detail and they weren’t important to the plot, and yet the very name made my mouth water for flaky, fishy goodness. I moved on from there, longing, in Tolkien, for the seed-cakes Bilbo “had baked that afternoon for his after-supper morsel” in The Hobbit, and for Lembas bread in The Lord of the Rings (who hasn’t), and of course for the rabbit stew Sam makes with the coneys Gollum brings him in the chapter entitled “Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit”. Strange, I know, but then a lot of literary fetichism is.

Now I can’t help but notice when food is described (or even just mentioned) in fiction. One of my favourite writers on food is Ian McEwan, who mentions food in his books in a consistently interesting way. In Atonement, there’s the roast and potatoes served at the country house in the first section of the novel, which the cook has to turn into cold cuts and salad because the weather is too warm; in On Chesil Beach, Edward and Florence spend their first evening as a married couple eating “a slice of melon decorated by a single glazed cherry (…), slices of long-ago roasted beef in thickened gravy, soft boiled vegetables, and potatoes of a bluish hue.” The novel takes place in 1962, and McEwan adds that “this was not a good moment in the history of English cuisine, but no one much minded at the time, except visitors from abroad.” I also love (and, in some ways, abhor) the last few pages of Solar, in which the obese main character, traveling to New Mexico, wolfs down a strange dish (an invention of McEwan’s) made up of “four wedges of skinless chicken breast, interleaved with three minute steaks, the whole wrapped in bacon, with a honey and cheese topping, and served with twice-roasted potatoes already impregnated with butter and cream cheese.” However, the McEwan food reference I prefer is in Saturday, in which the protagonist, Dr. Perowne, cooks up a memorable fish stew, lovingly described in all the details of its making: “He has now, he reckons, about two and a half litres of bright orange stock which he’ll cook for another five minutes. Just before dinner, he’ll reheat it, and simmer the clams, monkfish, mussels and prawns in it for ten minutes. They’ll eat the stew with brown bread, salad and red wine.” (McEwan put the recipe up on his website, by the way.)

Dickens is another great author on food. It’s always mentioned in passing, but with Dickens’ usual passionate verve. I’ve always wished I could taste the punch that Mr. Micawber specializes in making in David Copperfield, or the “two prodigious lobsters”, the “enormous crab”, and the “large canvas bag of shrimps” that Mr Peggotty brings to David. Or how could anyone forget the pudding Mrs Cratchit makes in a A Christmas Carol, ”like a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of half-a-quartern of ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top.” And then there are the pies, of course. It seems that in Dickens the word pie is like a burning brand, a miracle; he just needs to say the word and you can imagine the thick, golden pastry and the juicy meats inside, and the hot little pie-shops with their windows foggy with condensation. In David Copperfield there’s a “beefsteak pie (…) curiously flavoured (…) by a miscellaneous taste of tea, coffee, butter, bacon, cheese, new loaves, firewood, candles, and walnut ketchup, continually ascending from the shop”, and of course, how could I not mention the “beautiful round compact pork pie” Pip brings Magwich at the beginning of Great Expectations! I’m not sure how I would react to seeing the actual pie, but reading about it certainly makes my mouth water…

What about you? Have books every made you hungry for anything?

An illustration of Mr. Micawber mixing punch in Charles Dickens' "David Copperfield". Back then, punch was a drink of rum, lemon, and sugar, served warm.