The Banquet of Ester Rosenbaum - Brossura

Simpson, Penny

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0955527236 ISBN 13: 9780955527234

Casa editrice: Ylolfa, 2008

Riassunto

It is Berlin, 1929. The inflation-hungry city is edging towards disaster, but seven-foot Jewish orphan Esther Rosenbaum is serving up a banquet for friends.
They are the bohemians, artists and kabarett composers who have sampled her finest recipes in the legendary Schorns restaurant, and long declared her Germany's most celebrated chef. Except it is a life built on quicksand: Schorns' proprietor is owned by gay black marketeer Leon Wolf - but patronised by Nazis. The revolutionaries who briefly seized power ten years earlier are distracted by personal feuds and vendettas, manipulated by one Bertolt Brecht. Whilst Esther, once a towering presence clad in her peacock tapestry skirts, has started to dress as a man to blend into Berlin's vicious night streets. The cook capable of creating delicacies such as chocolate hearts stuffed with saffron pen nibs, has stopped eating and is reducing herself to bone.
Using a burlesque brand of magic realism, Penny Simpson conjures fantastical elements to show how cookery can be an act of storytelling, and imagination itself an act of subversion and survival.

Su questo libro

Recensione:

[An] extravaganza where the real and the imagined take turn and turn about... sumptuously detailed and fantastical... [this novel is] at once full of disturbing delicacy, and at the same time [forceful]... [marked by its] humour, verve and hallucinatory strangeness. --Clare Morgan, Times Literary Supplement

A feast of language, in some ways akin to the feasts depicted in the Biblical Book of Esther. Simpson s novel, though, is served on a platter embellished with similes and metaphors so strong that their aromas permeate the text with every page. --Jewish Book World (USA)

Magic realism at its political best, finely echoing the sense of unreality and disorientation that reigned as Hitler and the Nazis gradually gained power in a country still reeling in the aftermath of the Great War. True to the genre, Simpson uses plain language and an understated narrative voice to speak of extraordinary things. When I turned the last page, I found myself wanting to start the book all over again. --Suzy Ceulan Hughes, www.gwales.com

L'autore:

Penny Simpson trained as a journalist, before winning Barclays/TMA Theatre Critic of the Year in 1991. Her short stories have appeared in anthologies from Bloomsbury, Honno and Virago; DOGdays, her debut collection, was published in 2003. This is her first novel. She now works as Head of Press at Welsh National Opera.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Ylolfa
• Data di pubblicazione: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0955527236
• ISBN 13: 9780955527234
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 253