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    The Cook: A Novel
    The Cook: A Novel
    The Cook: A Novel
    Ebook77 pages1 hour

    The Cook: A Novel

    By Maylis de Kerangal and Sam Taylor

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    "A slim, bountiful, beautifully written (and gorgeously translated) 'Portrait of the Chef as a Young Man.'" --Nancy Klinke, The New York Times Book Review

    One of BBC Culture's Ten Books to Read this March and The Rumpus Book Club Pick for March

    Maylis de Kerangal follows up her acclaimed novel The Heart with a dissection of the world of a young Parisian chef

    More like a poetic biographical essay on a fictional person than a novel, The Cook is a coming-of-age journey centered on Mauro, a young self-taught cook. The story is told by an unnamed female narrator, Mauro’s friend and disciple who we also suspect might be in love with him. Set not only in Paris but in Berlin, Thailand, Burma, and other far-flung places over the course of fifteen years, the book is hyperrealistic—to the point of feeling, at times, like a documentary. It transcends this simplistic form, however, through the lyricism and intensely vivid evocative nature of Maylis de Kerangal’s prose, which conjures moods, sensations, and flavors, as well as the exhausting rigor and sometimes violent abuses of kitchen work.

    In The Cook, we follow Mauro as he finds his path in life: baking cakes as a child; cooking for his friends as a teenager; a series of studies, jobs, and travels; a failed love affair; a successful business; a virtual nervous breakdown; and—at the end—a rediscovery of his hunger for cooking, his appetite for life.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateMar 26, 2019
    ISBN9780374716196
    Author

    Maylis de Kerangal

    Maylis de Kerangal (Toulon, 1967) ha trabajado en el mundo editorial y es autora, entre otras, de las novelas Je marche sous un ciel de traîne, La Vie voyageuse, Corniche Kennedy y Tangente vers l’est, y del libro de relatos Ni fleurs ni couronnes. En Anagrama ha publicado la novela Nacimiento de un puente, traducida a ocho idiomas y galardonada con los premios Médicis, Franz Hessel y Gregor von Rezzori: «No sólo se nos cuenta la historia de la construcción de un puente colgante en la californiana ciudad imaginaria de Coca, sino el destino de una decena de personajes venidos de diversos puntos del planeta para trabajar en tamaña empresa, que, a modo de vidas cruzadas, se nos muestran en un escenario tan poco común... Una panorámica a vista de pájaro sin casco ni protección del alma humana» (Ángeles López, La Razón); «Nacimiento de un puente es una novela que arrastra como una locomotora desalmada hasta la última página. Una gran novela. Casi trescientas páginas fulgurantes, apretadas y llenas de poderío y tensión» (Jesús Ferrero, El País); «Singular y sorprendente» (Iñaki Ezquerra, El Comercio).

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    Reviews for The Cook

    3.5/5

    21 ratings3 reviews

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    • 4/5
      This was a shortie, an atmospheric little translated novel about a young man with a lifelong love of cooking who approaches the profession from a bunch of oblique angles, unsure of where he wants to land. Form follows function here—the book itself flashes in and out of brilliantly illuminated scenes from his life, almost like sights glimpsed from a train window (and in fact the novel opens on a train, so that might not be so fanciful of an analogy). Told from the point of view of an unidentified close friend, it follows Paolo through the places he works, and then owns, during his early career as a cook or chef, and the episodic narration really gets at how intense—both wonderful and awful—working in a kitchen is at any level. Great food descriptions, too. Not sure how long de Kerangal could have sustained the story past the novella stage, but it works the way it is: a tasting menu, a series of amuse-bouches, rather than a heavy meal.
    • 4/5
      You can feel the constant thrum of energy just below this man's surface.
    • 4/5
      The Cookby Maylis de KerangelTranslated by Sam Taylor2016Farrar,Straus, and Giroux4.0 / 5.0This is a memoir, written by a fictionalized cook, Mauro, and his culinary career in Berlin. Learning to bake cakes at 10 with no recipe, he went on to various jobs in restaurants, until finally opening one of his own. After 10 years he burnt out and sold it.This is amazingly deep for a novel that is about 100 pages. Mauro is vivid, earnest, humble and so easy to like. His career you want to follow.Entertaining and engaging.

    Book preview

    The Cook - Maylis de Kerangal

    1

    Berlin

    DONER KEBAB

    A train moves toward Berlin. It speeds through wide-open spaces, past smoking fields. It’s fall. Sitting in a second-class car, head leaning against the window, is a slender young man, about twenty years old, traveling light, a book in his hands; I am sitting on the bench facing him. I decipher the title on the book’s cover—La cuisine de référence, the famous French handbook for culinary professionals—and see the three stylized chef’s hats drawn against a red, white, and blue background, then I sit up and lean forward, propelling myself into the book’s pages with their rows of illustrations and italicized captions, step-by-step photographs that feature no human face or mouth, only torsos and hands: precise hands with clean, neatly trimmed fingernails; hands holding metal, glass, or plastic utensils; hands plunged inside containers, hands wielding blades, each hand captured in an action.

    The young man leafs through the book’s pages, consulting the table of contents and the glossary, the preface and the appendixes. He seems to be hovering around it without actually reading it, as if he didn’t know where to start. In fact, I think he doesn’t know much at all, not even what he’s doing on this train on this day at this hour, and if you asked him the question, if you put him on the spot and demanded, Why Berlin?, I imagine he would shrug, close his eyes, let his head sink back against the seat, and withdraw into himself. The only thing he is sure about is the fact of sitting in this car, immersed in its imitation leather and gleam of brass, in this atmosphere of confinement—damp warmth, detergent smell—his shoes touching this carpeted floor; the only thing he feels with any certainty is the steady power of the machine that carries him forward. A grayish blur through the window, the landscape is an old mattress; the boy closes the book and falls asleep.

    October 2005, and it’s freezing cold in Prenzlauer Berg as Mauro, travel bag slung over his shoulder, leaves the train station a few hours later and walks to a building on Lottumstrasse, where a friend of his has an apartment, rented for next to nothing, that will still be too big for the two of them. The staircase echoes, and when he reaches the landing, he finds the door open. Mauro enters, calls out—there’s no one. He sits cross-legged on the floor next to a coal stove sculpted like the base of a fountain. He looks around: the large room is arranged with a few pieces of restored furniture. He rubs his hands, realizes he’s hungry. He’s here for three months.

    All Mauro remembers of this Berlin period is the mix of cold, white, empty days and dark, hot, overpopulated nights—a balance that suits him. All the same, for the first few weeks, the daytime impresses him with its empty hours and its fibrous texture, like glass wool. Solitary hours in the apartment while Joachim—his roommate—works in a hip bar on Rosenthaler Strasse; floating hours where even the slightest movement makes the apartment creak, prompting him to turn up the music to its highest setting so he can’t hear anything else. He chills out in this sonic cloud until the time comes for him to slip into another one—at the bar, where he goes to meet the others. There, he focuses on the gestures, expressions, faces, of those around him since he doesn’t speak a word of German, and he writhes until dawn among the crazed bodies.

    One morning, though, he stirs himself, shakes himself like a young colt. A small loaf of black bread, a café americano, and he’s out the door. He goes out on reconnaissance, peacoat buttoned up tight, collar raised, less than ten euros in his pocket, and his gait now is that of a tracker on a hunt, as resolute as his path is random. The next day he goes out again, and he does the same the day after that. The streets in Berlin are organized clockwise: Pankow, Friedrichshain, Schöneberg, Dahlem, Charlottenburg, Tiergarten … Even so, he wears out his sneakers, his heels are covered with blisters, and when, from my window, I see him pass in the evening, on his way back down Lottumstrasse, I notice that he is limping slightly and remember a decoction of sage and green tea in which you can soak your feet to relieve the pain in the arches.

    These urban wanderings are punctuated by brief pauses in the cafés of Neukölln to down a quick beer; prolonged pauses in the lines outside kebab shops at lunchtime, long queues where people breathe steam into the biting cold, where they stamp their feet, where they hop up and down, arms folded, hands wedged under armpits. The doner is a Berlin institution; there are more kebab shops here than McDonald’s. Mauro will taste more than thirty during his stay, finally deciding on his favorite—made in a van at the Mehringdamm U-Bahn station. Crunchy slices of meat, sweet grilled onions, crisp fries, soft bread, the smooth sauce soaking through all of it, and hot, hot, hot: the perfect

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