The Cheffe: A Cook's Novel - Softcover

Ndiaye, Marie

 
9780593311684: The Cheffe: A Cook's Novel
Softcover
ISBN 10: 059331168X ISBN 13: 9780593311684
Verlag: Knopf Publishing Group, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

From the celebrated French writer Marie NDiaye--Prix Goncourt-winning author of Three Strong Women--comes the story of the Cheffe: a woman who lives in the single-minded pursuit of creating incomparable culinary delights.

Born into poverty in southwestern France, as a teenager the Cheffe takes a job working for a wealthy couple in a neighboring town. It is not long before it becomes clear that she has an unusual, remarkable talent for cooking, and soon her sheer talent and ambition put her in charge of the couple’s kitchen. Though she revels in the culinary spotlight, the Cheffe remains secretive about the rest of her life. She shares nothing of her feelings or emotions. She becomes pregnant but will not reveal her daughter’s father. And when the demands of her work become too great, she leaves her baby in the care of her family and sets out to open her own restaurant, to rave reviews. As time goes on, the Cheffe’s relationship with her daughter remains fraught, and eventually it threatens to destroy everything the Cheffe has spent her life perfecting. Told from the perspective of the Cheffe’s former assistant and unrequited lover, this stunning novel by Marie NDiaye is a gustatory tour de force.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

MARIE NDIAYE was born in Pithiviers, France, in 1967; spent her childhood with her French mother (her father was Senegalese); and studied linguistics at the Sorbonne. In 2001, she was awarded the prestigious Prix Femina for her novel Rosie Carpe; in 2009, the Prix Goncourt for Three Strong Women; and, in 2015, the Gold Medal in the Arts from the Kennedy Center International Committee on the Arts.

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Oh yes, of course, she got that question often. Endlessly, I’d even say, after all the Cheffe was famous, and maybe she had a secret she’d give away, out of weakness or weariness or indifference, or by mistake, or moved by a sudden fit of generosity to counsel anyone interested in her trade and in some sort of stardom, or guaranteed acclaim at least.
 
Yes, that fascinated a great many people, that glorious reputation she’d gained without really trying, and maybe they thought, maybe they imagined she was keeping the key to that mystery to herself, they saw a mystery there, she wasn’t very bright.
 
They were wrong on two counts.
 
For one thing she was terribly intelligent, and for another you don’t have to be as clever as she was to succeed in the business.
 
She liked being misunderstood.
 
She hated people accosting her, prodding her, she hated the threat of being unmasked.
 
No, no, she had never had a confidant before me, she was too reticent for that.
 
Very often people asked her that question you’re thinking of, and inevitably she shrugged her shoulders, smiled with the look she liked to put on, faintly mystified, distant, a look of sincere or feigned modesty, it wasn’t clear which, and answered, “It’s not hard, you just have to be organized.”
 
And when they kept pushing, she told them, “It just takes a little taste, it’s not hard,” and turned her high, narrow forehead very slightly away, pinching her thin lips as if to say not only that she’d tell them no more but also that she’d put up a fight if anyone tried to forcibly unclench her teeth.
 
The look on her face, and even on her body—­hard, closed, removed—­turned dull and dim and ridiculously adamant, and that put a stop to the questions, not because people were sorry they’d troubled her but because they thought she was thick in the head.
 
The Cheffe was fantastically intelligent.
 
How I loved to see her delight in being taken for a simpleminded woman!
 
Our sly, shared awareness of her vast intelligence felt like a bond between us, a bond that I cherished and that she didn’t mind, a bond I wasn’t the only one to feel, because there were others, long-­standing acquaintances who knew just how sharp she was, how perceptive, and who also sensed she wanted to keep that a secret from strangers and meddlers, but I was the youngest, I didn’t know her before, back when she cared less about secrecy, I was the youngest, and the most in love with her, of that I’m sure.
 
But also, she thought there was something excessive in the praise people had begun to heap on her cooking.
 
She found the phrasing of those panegyrics ridiculous and affected, it was a question of style.
 
She had no taste for preciousness or grandiloquence, and no respect.
 
She knew all about the force of the senses, after all it was her work to awaken them, and she was always enchanted to see that force show on the diners’ faces, she strove for nothing else, day in and day out, for so many years, virtually without rest.
 
But the words people used to describe that struck her as indecent.
 
“It’s very good” was all she wanted, all she could possibly ask.
 
To analyze in graphic detail all the causes and effects of the pleasures offered by her green-­robed leg of lamb, say, since today that’s her most famous dish and the emblem of her style (what people don’t realize is that toward the end she didn’t want to make it anymore, she was tired of it, just as a singer tires of the same beloved song she’s continually asked to repeat, it sickened her a little, she resented that magnificent leg of lamb for being more famous than she was, and for having let so many other dishes languish in undeserved obscurity, dishes that took far more work and skill, dishes she was far prouder of), to subject that rapture’s many and varied forms to minute analysis was in her mind to expose something intensely private to the full light of day, something in the eater and by extension in the Cheffe, it embarrassed her, at times like that she wished she’d never done anything, offered anything, sacrificed anything.
 
She never said so, but I knew.
 
She never would have said so, that too would have been revealing too much.
 
But I knew it, from the cold, stubborn silence she closed herself up in when she was dragged from her kitchen to hear out a customer who insisted on offering his compliments, who, whether intrigued, troubled, or spurred on by the Cheffe’s silence, refused to give up until he’d gotten some sort of answer, and to be done with it she slowly shook her head from right to left, as if, modest as she was, that gushing praise was a torment, she didn’t say a word, she was ashamed to be exhibiting herself, stripped bare, and the customer too, even if he didn’t know it.
 
And afterward her mood was dark, as if she’d been not praised but criticized or insulted.
 
If I was there looking on, or if at least she thought I was (often wrongly, since I always tried to slip away when the Cheffe was forced out into the dining room), I sensed that she held it against me, her dignity had been wounded in front of me.
 
And yet for my part—and mine alone, I wish I could say, but how to be sure?—­nothing could ever diminish my reverence and tenderness for the Cheffe, not even the spectacle of a scene in the dining room when, as did sometimes happen, she met the complaints of the very occasional dissatisfied customer with her usual lofty silence, offending the customer, who thought she was scorning him when she was only ignoring him, in her reserved way, just as she did her admirers.
 
Yes, that’s right, no happier with applause than with attacks.
 
At least those attacks never aspired to eloquence, and their words didn’t aim to penetrate the Cheffe’s heart and soul.
 
Yes, that’s right, the complaints concerned only the food, the Cheffe’s decision to combine this ingredient with that (even the celebrated green-­robed leg of lamb, for instance, before its renown grew so great that today it can’t be questioned, there were those who found fault with its sheath of sorrel and spinach, they would have preferred one or the other, or even chard), whereas the applause soon turned to glorification of the Cheffe herself, and then ventured into the secret world of her presumed intentions, a longing to know her truest being, the only possible source for those sublime dishes.
 
“Idiots,” the Cheffe once said to me, of all that to-­do.
 
She also claimed she couldn’t understand a third of what people wrote about her cooking—­confirmation for those who thought her dim-­witted, who were convinced her gift had come to her purely by chance.
 
Yes, they thought the severe, intransigent god of cuisine had chosen to become flesh in the form of that difficult, slightly dense little woman.
 
As I’ve told you, she was perfectly happy to be thought simpleminded, it was a way to be free.
 
She wasn’t one of those people who play stupid for so long that they become stupid, forgetting it started out as an act, no, playing that part only made her wilier, shrewder, maybe a touch cynical, I don’t know.
 
She was sharp, she was prickly, but for all that I’ve always thought the girl she once...

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Verlag
Knopf Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2021
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
059331168X
ISBN 13 
9780593311684
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
287
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
preigu
mail@preigu.de

Lengericher Landstr. 19
Osnabrück
49078
Deutschland

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