LITERARY FICTION
THE CHEFFE by Marie NDiaye
(MacLehose £12.99, 288 pp) AS THE thrill of watching MasterChef hopefuls sweat over their confits never grows old, here’s a wonderful novel probing the sacrifices attached to culinary renown.
An unnamed narrator relates the life story of a legendary female chef who escapes childhood poverty to open a Michelin-starred restaurant in Bordeaux.
Honing her gift in her teens while cooking for a rich family, she becomes pregnant but never reveals the father’s identity. She allows her daughter to be raised by others, which fuels the girl’s vengeful sense of resentment in adulthood.
This is such a cleverly constructed tale, with a surprising degree of suspense generated by the shadowy narrator’s slyly nested self-portrait gradually emerging from his profile of ‘la Cheffe’, as he reveals his own part in her story.
Moving and quietly captivating, it’s brilliantly done, and naturally chock-full of intriguing gastronomic description, too — ‘green olive sorbet’, anyone?
ON SWIFT HORSES by Shannon Pufahl
(Fourth Estate £12.99, 320pp) PUFAHL’S debut is a finely wrought two-hander about hushed-up desires in 1950s America.
In California, Muriel is a lonely waitress, hiding secret yearnings from her army veteran husband — and perhaps even from herself — as she steadily squirrels away the profits she makes betting on horse races on the quiet.
In Las Vegas, Muriel’s itinerant brotherin-law, Julius, discharged from the army in circumstances initially withheld from the reader, gets caught up in a gambling scam while navigating a risky underworld of forbidden lust.
Its steady gaze and even tone give an appropriately poker-faced quality to this novel, with contemporary references to the space race only highlighting how trapped the protagonists are.
Pufahl’s sudden escalations of narrative voltage wrongfoot the reader, who is lulled by the patience with which she dramatises stifled post-war mores.
But while the skill at work here is undeniable, the climactic symmetry between Muriel and Julius’s storylines feels forced.
THE GOD CHILD by Nana Oforiatta Ayim (Bloomsbury £16.99, 256pp)
THIS angular, tricky debut is hugely readable from one line to the next, but somewhat dizzying when you try to puzzle out how it hangs together.
It’s told by Maya, the daughter of an ousted Ghanaian royal who raises her in 1980s Germany together with her male cousin, Kojo, a joy-riding tearaway whose antics lead to both children being packed off to boarding school in England.
Kojo might be a handful, but he also opens Maya’s eyes to her tangled family history, recorded in a secret book he wants her to rewrite.
Shot through with untranslated German and Ghanaian Twi, the story’s gnomic, jewel-like fragments hop back and forth between Europe and Ghana.
Intriguing and fitfully engrossing, it feels like a classic coming-of-age narrative of isolation and misunderstanding, but Maya’s tale is also deeply concerned with Ghanaian history and the psychic dislocations of exile.
It sends up patronising, exploitative attitudes to Africa, too.