Marie Ndiaye's THE CHEFFE: A COOK'S NOVEL (Tr Jordan Stump, Narr Edoardo Ballerini)

Cuisine is an art form that still resists duplication. A painting can be made into prints, as can a film; a book can be re-printed in a variety of formats but still with that original text. A recorded performance can outlive its performer(s). But a culinary artist's specialty? That can barely be approximated, a recipe published, yes, but is it the same when someone else, following mere written instructions that only poorly communicate the scents, sounds and colors occurring in the process, attempts to make it? Or if the chef/cheffe has to make it AGAIN long after he or she has grown tired of doing so, for, in order for a new person to experience this art, the artist has to create it all over again from scratch. Imagine Leonardo da Vinci having to paint that famous smile anew every time someone wanted to see it!

Then, too, there is a huge chasm between the appreciators, fans, of great or even just good, cooking, and those of any other art form. Only perhaps aficionados of pornography feel the same tinge of shame that lovers of food for its own sake either actually feel or know they are expected to feel; gluttony and lust are both among the seven deadly sins, after all. And making a meal for someone is perhaps as intimate as titillating them sexually, for in the realm of the art of cooking it's pleasure and not mere consumption of calories to sustain life, that is the object of the preparation and consumption of food. 

Which is all to say that the life of the woman known only as The Cheffe* in Marie Ndiaye's novel is more fraught with ethical and moral issues than it is with the kind of cutthroat competition and tests of skill and endurance that we more usually associate with the restaurant business, with the professional kitchen. Anthony Bourdain: The Novel this ain't. Though it has glimpses, perhaps, of Michael Pollan: The Novel. If Pollan had a creepy stalker trying to stage-manage his life from behind the scenes.

We learn of the Cheffe's childhood poverty and unpleasant early education, all the steps of her rise to prominence as that rare thing, a female chef in France, through the unctuous narration of one of her assistants, a man who would gladly have been her lover had she any interest in such a thing,  and whose feverish idolization seeks a kind of possession of her anyway. He claims to be the only person who ever really understood her at all, to have known her better than anyone else ever did, but of course it's the Cheffe emulation that lives in his head that he tells us about, even as he expresses complaints on her behalf about how misunderstood she was. Voiced by actor Edoardo Ballerini doing his best Jeffrey Coombs impersonation, his every word is fawning, admiring, exacting but also more than a little creepy. He's younger than his idol by quite a bit but there's still something Humbert Humbert-ish abouut him, though it's a Humbert who genuinely is, instead of just wants to believe so, the submissive in the relationship, as he constantly revels in her moral superiority to him, and of course her greater culinary gifts and her status as his employer. 

A bit comically, the narrator, who refuses to see a single flaw in the Cheffe, sees nothing but flaws in the one person who may know the Cheffe even better than he does: her daughter, who is almost exactly his age. 

The venom Ballerini imparts to descriptions, even casual mentions, of this daughter reaches levels of absurdity that perfectly complement the poetic adoration of his perfect goddess of a boss, only barely letting escape here and there any hint that maybe the daughter, whose greatest sin in his eyes is disloyalty to her divine mother, might have a story of her own to tell of the Cheffe that isn't quite so flattering.

Hilariously, he constantly accuses the Cheffe of speaking of her daughter with the exact same refusal to find fault that he uses to speak of her, never once noticing the blatant projection and hoping that we don't, either, always perfunctory apologizing for mentioning it and rushing to return to the subject of, not so much cooking itself as the sublime meditation and the moral universe in which good cooking can take place. He has no sooner stuck another knife into the idea of the daughter than he's off again expounding on the Cheffe's commitment never to waste ingredients or to disrespect either the animal a kitchen worker is dismemberment or the kitchen workers themselves.

The result is a bit of a stifling read, this account of an obsessed man obsessing about the object of his obsession, anxiously micro-managing our every impression or idea about what's going on, but it's still also such a glorious story of life and art and food that you keep reading, or listening, anyway. Truly, this is a book that will make you hungry, will tempt you to blow that diet you started in January while I was indulging in tamago sandos in Japan.

But we never get to enjoy the literary food porn for long before our narrator is yanking our attention away from the food like a stern host who is saving those dishes for more important visitors, even as he makes us doubt their existence; the Assistant goes down in my books with some of the all-time great unreliable narrators. By about a third of the way through the novel, his status as an unreliable narrator really starts to sink in; I found myself speculating that this whole story is a bit of slight-of-hand, meant to distract us (again I think of Humbert Humbert) from, perhaps, an actual crime or two,  and not just crimes of the heart on the part of our boy. Neither of the women of whom he so passionately speaks ever makes an actual appearance on stage, as it were. Both are just figures he manipulates as he tells the story, the one serenely engaging in various acts of creation and kindness in his memory, the other maligned and despicable in his present account. Is this really "a novel of cooking" or a heavily disguised confession? 

Have I just been reading too much crime fiction lately?

It would be interesting to someday read a counterpart to this novel that is more truly a character study of the Cheffe as she struggles for and wins her place in the still deeply sexist world of fine cuisine, with the tremendous pressure and discomfort of fame and being misunderstood through that fame, with the values of her dignified but bohemian parents who raised her in simple and, our narrator insists, strangely happy poverty but have no wish to benefit from her success. She overcomes these obstacles and more, but in this book we only see her indirectly, an elegant insect trapped in the amber of a dude's imagination. Which is maybe the whole point of this book. I bet Ndiaye herself has had a few guys like this narrator in her life. I think most of us have. 

Meanwhile, parts of the Assistant's strange post-Cheffe life have crept in. He seems to be sort of hiding out in a very posh retirement village he is technically too young to live in, spending wonderful days on various terraces in the kinds of endless parties that cannot but remind me of those in J.G. Ballard's High-Rise, a novel I did not expect to be thinking of in reading this book. A sub-plot involving an approaching visit to him by a suddenly announced daughter there becomes so prominent in the last quarter or so of the book that it starts all but breaking up paragraphs about the Cheffe without really seeming like it's ever going to have anything to do with the title character. Many reviewers have complained about all of this as an annoying distraction, a diminishment of quality on the part of critical darling Ndiaye, but if one understands that this is the story, not of the Cheffe but of another's hijacking of her legacy, all of this material snaps into place. The Assistant confides to us that he's never told his new friends and neighbors that he had a modest culinary career in the shadow of greatness and gloats over the pleasure he takes in being always given their own inferior efforts in that direction to try and how their condescending assumptions about his uneducated palate (more projection on his part, of course) amuse him. It all leads us further into the labyrinth of his telling of the Cheffe and her life as we wonder not only what became of her beyond those quiet late nights with him in the kitchen of her famous restaurant (a fait accompli from The Cheffe's earliest pages so this is not a spoiler), but how he came to retire so early and in such splendor. 

This is my second Marie Ndiaye novel, and my first read for my follow up to January in Japan, February from the French (I'm focusing not merely on novels from the nation of France, but from throughout the French-speaking world, so I couldn't call it February in France). If my public library were quicker about buying stuff I request, or I were more in funds, I would be in great danger of just letting this turn into Marie Ndiaye Month. It's a bummer that I can't. But I console myself that I've got some Virginie Despentes and Yasmina Khadra and Balzac and Collette and more on the pile. It should be a pretty great month here at Kate of Mind!