December, Elizabeth H. Winthrop

Elizabeth J. Winthrop’s December is a thought provoking novel about an eleven year-old girl who has stopped speaking. We enter Isabelle’s world in December, in New England, as her parents, Wilson and Ruth, search desperately for a solution.

Isabelle’s school has allowed this artistic and musical adolescent to complete her assignments at home but can not accept this situation any longer. Ruth has given up her legal practice to cope with Isabelle but she is reaching the end of her patience.

We hear the story through the discussions of the parents, through their thoughts and the mind of Isabelle. We witness frequent family occasions in the kitchen and in restaurants where Isabelle is fed mouth-watering American childhood delights. With Ruth and Isabelle, we meet the helpless and tactless psychologist, the headmistress and the art teacher in the parent/child art class. The story is set against a wintery New England and New York landscape.

Like the three main characters, we are trying to pick up clues to explain Isabelle’s enforced silence – family stresses, a dying pet, the death of a squirrel. Even Isabelle is trapped in her own silence. We become as anxious as the characters to find a solution.

This is such an unusual novel. It is refreshingly different, revealing no villains but simply a normal family in the throes of a crisis. It is well worth reading.

The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce, Paul Torday

Those of us who were delighted by Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, a Richard and Judy summer read, were eagerly awaiting the publication of The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce, by Paul Torday.

In many ways, it lived up to expectation. The rows of bottles and glasses on the cover warned us what to expect. Indeed, Torday’s evocation of the hundreds of thousands of bottles that Wilberforce inherits is tantalising.

The story is almost back to front – but not quite. We begin at the beginning, when Wilberforce, by chance, wanders into Francis Black’s realm – his undercroft, where the wine is stored. We then work backwards in four sections.

The first section, presenting the final years, is a dramatic presentation of a dipsomaniac who can consume several thousand-pounds-worth of treasured classic wine in one day. We have hints that there has been an accident and that he has lost Catherine. We are told, very clearly, that he will not survive his alcoholism. Torday’s ability to chart the thinking of a man dying of an addiction is stunning.

The remaining three sections slowly take us back to Wilberforce’s past when, as an adopted child and mathematical genius, he made a fortune, met his benefactor and fell in love with Catherine. Our sympathy for him and understanding of his plight slowly develops. We begin to understand his desire to be part of the wealthy world he has strayed into. Magic touches, like the first name of Wilberforce, that has been kept secret from us, complete a dramatic picture.

This is a novel for wine lovers – or perhaps a warning!

Fish, Flesh and Good Red Herring, Alice Thomas Ellis

Cookery books are not generally as amusing as this one! Alice Thomas Ellis gives us three centuries of recipes and tasty titbits about food, sprinkled with a delightful handful of comedy.

Take, for example, the anecdote about Edgar and Gladys – he married her in haste when he was leaving for a remote part of Africa. When she joins him, he shows her round the bungalow and asks what she means to cook him for supper. Eggs were, he claimed, the only available ingredients. ‘But I don’t cook eggs!’ responded Gladys, who hated cooking, ‘but I could play you some Chopin.’  He threw her to the lions.

The male chauvinism of such a story is matched by the opulence of some of the menus. A menu for a 21st birthday party includes 30 roasted bullocks, 50 hogs, 50 calves and 50 sheep as well as, rather oddly, one leveret.

Five a day was simply not the rule. We are struck by the absence of vegetables in menus of the last three centuries.

Full of laughs and well worth reading, Fish, Flesh and Good Red Herring – A Gallimaufry, published by Virago, is nevertheless, a book to dip into. It will keep you laughing for a month, but would be difficult to digest in a single portion.

Just for a change, I thought I would take a detour from ‘Book My Place’ and talk about a ‘Museum My Place’

In ‘La France Voisine’, about an hour’s drive from Geneva in the beautiful Jura lakes area, at Clairvaux Les Lacs, there is an astonishing new museum – Les Machines à Nourrir le Monde.

A shepherd in the hamlet of Augisey who had time on his hands created his own toolbench and spent forty-five years of his life creating scale models entirely out of a variety of woods. When he died in 2000, his family arranged to have his life’s work on show in Clairvaux.

The visit begins with a film that shows that all the models are working models and complete even to the minute screws, pipes and tools.

For us, the agricultural machines were the most fascinating. We visited the museum with a group that included several local farmers and they exclaimed with joy that they had used those very machines in their youth. These ranged from simple hand ploughs to elaborate harvesting machines. We couldn’t help thinking how the display demonstrated how a machine today can do the work of ten men.

The museum is open from May to September and can cater for groups. There is a small gift shop selling attrative wooden items ranging from wind chimes and fruit bowls to toys. Call 0033 684741310 or 0033 384258177 for information or contact@museemaquettebois.fr or http://www.museemaquettebois.fr

A fine way to complete your day in that area is to take a cruise on Le Louisiane, the paddle steamer that takes you for commented trips along the Lac de Vouglans, a beautiful, 35 km long remote wooded lake. (Telephone 0033 384254678 for details.)

The Sunday Times reviewer claimed that ‘This could be the best diet book ever written’, referring to John Humphry’s The Great Food Gamble.  So true!

Read the chapter ‘Fear of Fish’ and you’ll shun that lovely rich-coloured salmon. I almost wept as I read his description of the sea bed where a fish farm had been a year before. His details of how the salmon live are terrifying.

Fish, chicken, meat, eggs, fruit … it all looks very different when his incisive and knowledgeable treatment is applied to the way we have changed our food production habits over the last century.

The paperback is heavy reading but I would put it on a ‘must read’ list and there are lovely light touches like when, for example, he describes his diving experience.

The last chapter, read alone, is sufficient warning. Humphrys, in effect, interviews himself – one voice the convinced man speaking for a new look at what we do to our food – the other a devil’s advocate coming up with and demolishing all the stock rejoinders. It is most convincing.

What do you do if you open your mailbox to find that someone has sent you a copy of Jamie Oliver’s brand new cookbook, The Naked Chef 2? It has to be spam – but no!

You tentatively open and ‘It seems that someone at Jamie Oliver’s publishing company sent a word document version of his second book to one of their mates this morning and it is now flying round the web at a rate of knots … Yours for nothing! Enjoy and pass it on.’

What a dilemma! Surely this infringes copyright – no upright person is going to download and print it – should I even be reading it? – But the recipes look delicious. We love mango lassi in the local Indian restaurant. Even the Migros version passes muster. Jamie’s recipe sounds delicious. Who could resist attempting his passion-fruit pavlova?

Well, I couldn’t and it was superb. Where is my moral fibre, you ask? Well -  here’s a thought. This wonderful recipe book will be on my Christmas present list for all my friends. I am sure other recipients of the free copy will do the same.

Could it be that The Naked Chef 2 was deliberately leaked to whet our appetites?