Trying Out Another Deadly Sin: Gluttony

A week or so ago, the New York Times magazine did the entire issue on food. Most of the articles were written in question and answer format, and one in particular caught my hungry eye: what was the best book about food ever written? Several were mentioned, but the responder acclaimed The Belly of Paris by Emile Zola as the hands down winner. Even though I could not progress very far into Zola's lust list book, Nana, I devoured TBOP.

The novel is set in 1858 Paris in the neighborhood of the recently completed Les Halles market place. It is the depiction of the various food stalls, the delivery wagons' congestion in the approaching streets, the smells of the slaughtering of live animals in its cellars that makes the book an overstuffed panorama. What keeps it from being a glossy spread from a mad version of Gourmet is the overlay of the people who keep the stalls and their small business owner counterparts in the becoming gentrified neighborhood. These characters are the worms in the apples, the mold on the meat.

Zola writes unforgettable characters, all flawed, some idealistic, some simple, but most devious and self-serving. Most memorable are the Beautiful Lisa and her challenger for local ideal woman, the Beautiful Norman (not a man but from Normandy); and the three neighborhood magpies whose gossip more than any political intrigue brings down the key male characters and sets the supporting females and other minor inhabitants back into their bourgeois orbits.

All the people who populate the story in one way or another have jobs in the "food industry." Florent the convict who escaped from his exile in Devil's Island because an inspector at Les Halles; Gavard sells poultry; Quenu, Florent's brother, owns a charcuterie; with the exception of Q, most men meet nightly at the local bistro to drink and conspire yet another popular uprising to overthrow the latest corrupt French government. (How odd to be reading about a conspiracy to pack the streets with dissidents as the "Wall Street" demonstrations spread to other cities and people I know whose blood still boils from the anti-war movement of the 60s rush to participate ... making Florent's internalized, personalized oppression wrapped in idealistic reform seem more believable.)

This 2009 translation is by Mark Kurlansky whose books Salt and Cod I read and enjoyed a couple of years ago. His style is probably what is making this particular Zola easier to get through than Nana. I reserved a couple other of Kurlansky's book and in keeping with the political rather than the epicurean theme, the first one I started reading in the pile is 1968.