La Cucina: A Novel of Rapture

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing and Downright Stupid
Review: While I read this book, I found myself hoping, it seems, against hope, that something within its pages would hook me and justify the other rave reviews that this book received from other readers. Whatever turned them on failed to do the same for me. I found the story, the characters, and yes, even the culinary secrets to be insipid. Rosa, even in her agony of losing her first love, merely reports what is going on around her--and that is not to say that the author succeeds in portraying her as a woman distraught beyond words--she is simply flat and two-dimensional I wondered if the novel had been written in another language and then translated badly into English--but alas, no. The author simply fails to make Rosa a likeable character. Her frenzy of cooking supposedly meant to obliterate her pain should tantalize the reader with other mesmerizing sensations, but again, this does not occur. Instead, it translates Rosa into a blood-thirsty butcher that appears about as senseless as a hamster turning mindlessly within the staid boredom of its exercise wheel--no offense to the hamster. The plot is likewise boring and ridiculous. Rosa runs away to become a librarian in Palermo where after twenty long and tedious years finally becomes enamoured with an Enlishman with terrible teeth---I kept envisioning Austin Powers loverly yellowed dentures--UGH! Their so-called erotic love scenes are also meant to titillate, but they are puncuated with descriptions of Rosa's sausagelike physique encased in sausage skin corsets out of which the hero must slice her. Not very sexy. The grand climax--excuse the pun-involves, inevitably with a Sicilian tale--the NIAF should be notified of this acutely painful stereotyping--the Mafia and sadly, more of Prior's canned peasant activities---most notably Rosa discovering her father may be either a debauched priest or a half-witted farmhand, Rosa finding her mother dead in a lump of kneaded dough and SuperRosa aiding in the delivery of her Siamese twin brothers' prostitute wife's triplet daughters. Phew! The reunification of the two lovers is given no play at all--resulting in a tiny paragraph on the last page where miraculously Rosa as new queen of the country farm is proudly enscounced with her fabulously fattening food, her lackey brothers and finally her own personal court jester.
I do not recommend this book AT ALL. ... Just don't take 'La Cucina' seriously, the characters and the plot which I suppose the author and her editor thought hysterically off key simply fail to amuse. I add an extra star for some of the culinary procedures explained throughout the book; they do call to mind the rich smell of garlic sauteeing in a good full-bodied olive oil, but pathetically the book does nothing more.