AUTHOR: Vicente Molina Foix
PUBLISHER:Anagrama
GENRE: Fiction
READER’S NAME: Jennifer Ottman
DATE: June 2, 2022
Four sisters run a luxury restaurant, with thirty seats, three Michelin stars, and a six-month waitlist for reservations, out of their home in a small town on the Mediterranean coast. The time is the approximate present (without the pandemic), and the first-person narrator, Julia, is the third sister, eleven minutes older—as she is fond of recalling—than her twin. Now in their mid-twenties, the twins were orphaned soon after birth and raised by the two other sisters, who are some two decades older. When the story opens, the four women are living seemingly contented lives focused entirely on their restaurant and each other. Their days and their thoughts are fully occupied by imagining new gourmet dishes, cooking and serving them, and cleaning up afterward, all of which they do themselves, with no other restaurant staff.
Although they are well regarded in the town, as excellent customers for local food suppliers and beneficent providers of charity, they neither have nor seem to feel the need for any social or romantic life outside their own tight circle, spending even their time off in each other’s company. Then one day, a young man named Maxi is hired by the two older sisters as a private investigator, on a mission left unexplained to the younger twins and hence to the reader. Installed in the house’s attic guest room, Maxi helps out occasionally in the kitchen and accompanies the sisters on trips to the beach or to town on the days the restaurant is closed, but he also disappears on mysterious errands, brings home foreign friends with occult tattoos, and is observed by the spying Julia in clandestine predawn meetings with unknown individuals.
Other strange things begin to occur as well, some suggesting the world of a crime thriller—unexplained gunshots, theft attempts targeting an exotic citrus tree that provides the secret ingredient for the sisters’ culinary masterpiece—and others more fantastical, visions (or hallucinations?) of the past or the future—an air-raid siren heard wailing over a peacetime beach, a parade of extinct animals from all corners of the globe passing before the restaurant’s windows during dinner service. And then there are the erotic tensions arising from the introduction of a handsome young man into this household of single women . . .
The author of a dozen novels, several of which have won various Spanish literary prizes, Vicente Molina Foix is also a poet, playwright, librettist, film director, and film critic. Perhaps not coincidentally, a movie version of this novel is easy to imagine, with lingering shots of Mediterranean vistas, close-ups of elaborately plated food, and an assortment of noir capers. The final resolution of the mystery, a tale of long-buried family secrets set in the context of some of the historical tragedies of the twentieth century, is not especially plausible, but verisimilitude is not really the goal. The novel is entertaining and fluidly written and would appeal to many readers of light fiction in the United States.
Not as psychologically complex as Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate, which its magical-realist elements and culinary focus may bring to mind, and without that book’s detailed recipes, it is a lighter, more cheerful read, one in which the patriarchal oppression that is one of Esquivel’s themes is notably absent. It is a story of several generations of independent, successful women, full of mouth-watering lists of the dishes they cook and serve, and it may also introduce readers to the relatively unknown history of the Stalinist deportation of the Crimean Tatars (a plot element in the family saga). It poses no particular translation difficulties, either linguistically or culturally.
