Author: JACOB, ANGELICA
Title: Fermentation
Description: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. 1997. (ISBN: 9780747531524). Paperback, 20 cm. Paperback in good condition. From Library Journal There has been a spate of novels recently offering recipes as remedies or curses. Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate (LJ 9/1/92), which was made into a motion picture, and Jane Kolpen's charming fable, The Secrets of Pistoulet (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1996), come immediately to mind. Fermentation follows this style except that the chapter headings are not recipes but descriptions of various cheeses the pregnant heroine craves. She also craves Serge, a fire-eater and street performer who wants to teach her his craft. The pseudoymous Angelica J. who works in London in the publishing industry, explores the nature of helpless attraction using the familiar metaphor of moth and flame, partially refreshed by the protagonist's feeding the dead moth to her pet chameleon. The final chapter heading is for "Handmade Cheese," made from her breast milk. Unfortunately, the author so distances herself from her characters that they are hard to care about. Our heroine's erotic and violent dreams may entice some reades, but not may. An optional purchase.?Judith Kicinski, Sarah Lawrence Coll. Bronxville, N.Y. From Kirkus Reviews Categorized by its publisher as ``Fiction, Erotica,'' here's a small British morsel in the love-and-cooking genre from the pseudonymous Angelica J. about whom nothing is revealed except that she (it seems) ``was born in 1963 and works in publishing.'' The young woman Odissa (no last name) meets the traveling fire-eater Serge (no last name) in the French town of Cauterets. Soon after Serge's departure, Odissa receives a blank postcard and travels to the city (unnamed) of its postmark, where she spends 17 days hunting for Serge. Lovemaking ensues, along with some very rough treatment by Serge having to do with his wish to teach Odissa the art of fire-eating and her understandable desire not to--after all, she's already jealous of Serge's other love-mate, Justine, who travels with him in performance and whose face is hideously fire-scarred. Odissa, unsurprisingly, becomes pregnant, and, also unsurprisingly, Serge departs for a long time on his travels. More surprising, perhaps, is that Odissas's pregnancy-craving is for cheese, and that the chapters she narrates as her pregnancy advances are each pressed into association with one type of it or another--Brie, Roquefort, etc.- -and thereby the trope develops that just as cheese ferments in the making, so a baby does in the gestating. One dream per chapter also occurs (Serge warned that cheese before bed would bring bad dreams), constituting much of the erotica part of the undertaking. One dream involves forcible submission in a pool of spilled milk, another a simultaneous rape and throat-cutting, yet another a carnival event consisting of a wall with holes in it through which male customers extend their pertinent parts. Symbols galore (fire, drought, rain, childbirth) can't transform this small, two- dimensional, and rather self-conscious tale into something beyond itself; nor does an existentially affectless tone--Kosinski comes to mind--succeed in doing much beyond achieving its opposite, the portentous and affected. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. Used: Acceptable.

Keywords: Pregnant women -- Fiction, Cheese -- Fiction, Erotic fiction 9780747531524


See more books from our catalog: Erotica