Book Review: The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I'm a fan of 'the gimmick' and Aimee Bender's book applies a pretty fascinating one: its protagonist, Rose, is able to taste people's deepest feelings in the food they prepare. Maybe you're skeptical though. The threat, I know, is that the whole novel will have to kowtow to this central plot device--putting undue weight on Bender's ability to write a decent, unpredictable ending. Well lay your fears aside.
From page five, when I was running the book to my copy machine to save a particularly well written scene, I knew this was going to be something more. Bender, somehow, manages to make Rose's 'special skill' into something less interesting than the humanity it helps her to recognize: her father, hiding blind in his nostalgic idealism; her mother, inexpertly trying to see a place in a family that makes her feel like an invisible student among prophets, a brother who wanders in and out of rooms like a ghost, taxed by the weight of knowing too much without the means to express it, and George, the friend who brings the light, but also takes it with him when he goes. And scattered along the way are numerous tinier allegories, stories, and clues that help you to imbibe this world, taste it as Rose does, and discover it, and her, and yourself along the way. Allow this book to spread over your palate, and it may just reveal to you, I hope, your own special gifts, that you, also, too often dismiss as a curse, because they require you to grow and make something of them.

"Food is all those substances which, submitted to the action of the stomach, can be assimilated or changed into life by digestion, and can thus repair the losses which the human body suffers through the act of living."
-The Physiology of Taste, Brillat-Savarin
(epigraph to The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake)

Rose on Doritos:
"What is good about a Dorito, I said, in full voice, is that I'm not supposed to pay attention to it. As soon as I do, it tastes like every other ordinary chip. But if I stop paying attention, it becomes the most delicious thing in the world...
...a Dorito asks nothing of you, which is its great gift. It only asks that you are not there."
(pp. 127-8)



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