A Song to Drown Rivers by Ann Liang (St. Martin's Press)

“Beauty is not so different from destruction.” Xishi has been shielded from what her beauty could inflict upon her since she was very young. Each time she leaves the house, her mother veils her face to ward off the attention that comes from being the most beautiful girl in the village. 

But beauty has its uses and in a region where two kings vie for power, the weaker monarch needs a weapon to defeat the man who has taken over his kingdom. Sending Fanli, his trusted political and military advisor, to find the loveliest girl in the area, he’s certain that great beauty will cause the downfall of his enemy. 

Fanli is a man who seems impervious to female charms but he knows how to assess them. He chooses Xishi to accomplish what the King of Yue has planned--to marry the King of Wu and charm that ruler into doing exactly what she wishes, leading her husband to unwittingly lower his defences and lose his kingdom.

Xishi is a peasant girl without refinement or sophistication so before she begins this project, she needs extensive training under the watchful gaze of Fanli. She falls in love with him but is bound to accomplish her goal. She hates the King of Wu almost as much as his rival does because she had watched Wu soldiers kill her sister. Revenge propels her away from the man she loves and into the treacherous life of a royal court. 

The King of Wu is seduced by her beauty and fulfills every wish she voices, wishes that weaken his kingdom, provide a gateway for the Yue invasion, and ensure that Xishi might eventually regain a life of freedom. But politics is a dangerous game and beauty can lead to destruction as well as cause it.

Ann Liang wrote A Song to Drown Rivers when she was twenty-one, basing it upon the legend of China’s Four Beauties, of whom Xishi was the first. Although the novel is being marketed as fantasy, it’s actually a carefully researched work of historical fiction. Its first sentence is crafted from the Chinese saying that great beauty causes the fish to sink, the geese to fall from the sky, eclipsing the moon and shaming the flowers. It recreates a turbulent chapter in Chinese history, when the state of Wu came into power and threatened neighboring kingdoms. The story of how a beautiful girl was used as a pawn by the King of Yue to eradicate this threat is told in the Spring and Autumn Annals which supposedly were collected and compiled by Confucius.

Often retold legends become cumbersome and ungainly, with language that weighs down the story. Luckily that isn’t the case with this version of Xishi’s life. Although Liang carefully describes the opulence and luxury of the royal lives and the intricacy of political plots, she never turns her heroine into “someone barely even human, a creature of myth.” She gives Xishi a spirit that resonates and enthralls through the centuries, telling her story in a fluid, fast-paced style that never flags or falters, while giving it the delicate grace of a fairy tale. 

Although she has written four novels for young adults, this is Ann Liang’s debut foray into adult fiction. Let’s hope it won’t be her last.~Janet Brown

Rosarita by Anita Desai (Scribner)

Our mothers are the ones who first teach us about secrets. They’re the ones who tell us the truth about Santa and the Tooth Fairy after hiding that from us during our earliest years. They slowly divulge other hidden stories as we get older, but it’s only after they die that we realize they’ve concealed the biggest secret of all, one we’ll never know. Who were our mothers in the years before we were born to them?

The narrator of Rosarita is certain she knows all there is to know about her mother and none of it is particularly interesting. Then she goes off from her home in India to San Miguel in Mexico, a place she’d never heard of before until she goes there to study Spanish. While sitting on a park, she’s accosted by a stranger who greets her effusively, saying she once was good friends with the narrator’s mother. “Rosarita,” she calls her vanished friend although the narrator assures her that her mother was Sarita. “Did I not say?” the stranger insists, and is delighted to learn that the narrator is named Bonita. “She would of course have given you a name she heard here,” the woman claims, while Bonita insists her name is similar to others given to girls in India. 

“You look just like your mother,” the stranger insists, “Are you an artist too?” Your mother came here to paint and we were good friends, is the burden of this stranger’s insistent story.

Although Bonita is convinced that this old woman is mad, she begins to piece together all she remembers of her mother and finds there are large gaps in her knowledge. Little unexplained scraps of her childhood reappear in her memory, the boxes of paper stored away and never unpacked in an unused room where she often finds her mother collapsed on the floor, in tears; the small unsigned pastel sketch that hung above her bed that was a picture of a woman sitting on a park bench with a small child playing in the dirt nearby. Yes, she admits to herself. This park looks much like the one where she was accosted by the eerie stranger.

She begins to see the old woman everywhere she goes and is persuaded to accompany her to places where her mother once lived during her Mexican sojourn. Disbelieving but still curious, she follows the person she’s begun to think of as The Trickster to spots that have been abandoned--a house her mother supposedly had lived in that’s now a piece of a tiled wall in a vacant lot, a place that had been a refuge for artists that has only the remains of a ruined chapel and a few dilapidated huts.

As she learns about the dreadful similarities between the Mexican Revolution and India’s partition, each with their trains carrying “unspeakable cargoes” of corpses and injured refugees through “barbaric landscapes,” she remembers her mother being disparagingly termed as one of the “railway people” by relatives of Bonita’s father. When asked about her past, her mother would say only “I can’t remember.” As The Trickster leads her to the Mexican coast, a relative of this strange woman might have details of truth about Bonita’s mother, but when her guide lapses into madness, the questions go unasked. The life of her mother becomes alive in her imagination, “a fragment of truth,” “unfolding like a scroll, its beginning and its end both invisible.”

Yet there is that solitary sketch that evokes Mexico, her mother’s unexplained misery and long absence, and the kohl-rimmed eyes, the arms filled with bangles, and the smell of a South Asian fragrance that The Trickster wears when she introduces herself at the beginning of this quest. Is this enough to establish a tenuous truth? It becomes enough to lead Bonita through Mexico, with her unanswered questions and the possibility of discovering her mother’s past.

Although Rosarita is a slender book with a size much smaller than the usual novel, it teases and haunts with that universal mystery of the secrets mothers never divulge. Desai makes Bonita’s Mexican journey irresistible with descriptions that beckon and entice, with a bright and sharp beauty. In an author’s note, she elaborates upon the parallels between the histories of India and Mexico that in the past drew an Indian artist to this other country, in the same way The Trickster claims it drew Bonita’s mother. Gently and inexorably, Rosarita demands more than one reading of a story that’s both tantalizing and satisfying, ending with questions and the joy of an unending adventure.~Janet Brown

Darkmotherland by Samrat Upadhyay (Soho Press)

Never before have I read a book simply because it’s an inexplicable train wreck but that’s what kept me going through the recent release from Soho Press, Samrat Upadhay’s 759-page novel, Darkmotherland. 

Set in a thinly-disguised Nepal after a devastating earthquake that has left many survivors homeless and housed in tents, the plot plunges into a coup that has put a minor bureaucrat in charge of a shattered country. Derisively nicknamed the Hippo but faced with little opposition, the new ruler is gleefully enriching himself and increasing the fortunes of the affluent, while everyone else clings to a precarious form of existence. He is strengthened by the tweeted message conveying support from the Amrikan leader, President Corn Hair. This inspires him to adapt a slogan from that country--”Make Darkmotherland Great Again,” while encouraging his citizens to wear red caps.

Although a cast of characters that rival the vast multitude found in War and Peace fill the pages of this book, there are two main figures. One is Kranti, the daughter of a dissident mother. Although her name means Revolution, Kranti loathes her mother’s politics and silently supports the Hippo. Her rich and handsome boyfriend, on the other hand, has become one of her mother’s supporters. The other leading character is Rozy, a gorgeous homosexual whom the Hippo adores and has elevated to a prominent position of influence. 

Slowly both of these protagonists take on different states of mind. Kranti, before marrying her boyfriend, becomes enthralled by a resident of the tent community, a poet whose politics are devoted to humanitarian efforts extended to the refugees he lives among. When Kranti’s husband is killed because of his dissident stance, she becomes openly involved with the poverty-stricken poet.

Rozy, privy to the Hippo’s secrets and regarded in a tacit form of awe by his cabinet, gradually learns that the national veneration of the Darkmother can become a political advantage. In a place where coups are easily accepted, no leader is secure--unless that figure becomes spiritually entwined with the goddess that has given her name to the country.

In this morass of characters and intrigue, a satirical allegory lurks. An Amrikan expat gives names to the dogs who cluster near his restaurant: Eric, Ivanka, Pence, Pompeo. When the Hippo makes a trip to pay homage to President Corn Hair, he discovers that the “Amrikan press has been cowed and tamed,” Political protests in Amrika have dwindled because “the people have simply exhausted themselves protesting.” The Hippo finds reassurance in President Corn Hair’s hints that future elections may be forever cancelled but when he returns to Darkmotherland, he finds everything has changed in his absence.

No character in this novel deviates from the repulsive and the only feeling they evoke is a horrified and nauseated fascination. Upadhyay gives free rein to an unfortunate predilection for clumsy wordplay and sentences that all too often rhyme. What at first seems to be an excursion into Orwellian satire becomes a quagmire of absurdity. 

The only reason to pay attention to Darkmotherland is to warn off any prospective readers. This is a contender for one of the worst novels written in English. Buyers beware.~Janet Brown

Thai Food by David Thompson, photography by Earl Carter (Ten Speed Press)

Do you remember life back in 2002? Internet cafes were a popular feature in big cities and email was considered cutting edge technology. Letters and postcards were keeping post offices afloat all around the world and bookstores were just beginning to worry about that online business, Amazon. Facebook wouldn’t be invented for another two years and wouldn’t be released to the general public until two years after that. Digital cameras were just beginning to catch on. Nobody had heard of Kindles because they weren’t invented until 2007. Many people had landlines and answering machines because cell phones were too cumbersome to use as a primary form of communication. Books were read on paper, not on screens. 

And in that year, Ten Speed Press, an upstart publishing house based in the Bay Area of San Francisco, released a 674-page cookbook with a simple title, Thai Food. 

At this time, Thai restaurants weren’t a common sight in American cities of all sizes and Thailand hadn’t yet become the world’s favorite holiday destination. David Thompson was a young Australian who had fallen in love with Thai food and with the country where it was eaten every day, whose Thai restaurant in London had received a Michelin star the year before. Outside of the culinary world, nobody knew his name. His new book cost $45.00, the equivalent to $78.95 in today’s currency. Why wasn’t it a flop?

The best cookbooks are the ones that people read for pleasure. M. F. K. Fisher, Laurie Colwin, Brillat-Savarin, even Irma Rombauer’s The Joy of Cooking, are picked up because they’re all interesting—and often fun—to read. David Thompson knew that and wrote a cookbook that’s an encyclopedia of Thailand’s history, geography, culture, and food, along with detailed instructions on how to create its recipes.

The recipes, he’s quick to assert, aren’t his. He was fortunate to become friends with some of Thailand’s aristocratic matriarchs who had been rigidly trained in the art of royal Thai cuisine. Their standards were unyielding and painstaking. The food they had eaten all their lives had three unassailable components: taste, texture, and seasoning. In pursuit of these attributes, they tolerated no shortcuts and no skimping. 

Their own training came from “memorial books,” that collected recipes beloved by the deceased noblewoman to whom the book was a tribute. They shared these with Thompson and he took their standards as his own. “The best food of any country, “ he says, “has always been centered around the court, and this was certainly true of Siam.” Although Thai Food doesn’t ignore street food and rural staples, it has a primary goal: to preserve how to make the food that was eaten by those who could afford the very best, “before it is eroded, altered, and modernized.”

Thompson is an exceptionally fine writer and an opinionated one who sternly proclaims that Thai cookery is “not an instant cuisine.”  “Substitutions and shortcuts in describing the food would not only be disrespectful but debasing.”

Canned coconut cream he deplores as “bastardized” and he tells exactly how to extract milk and cream from a fresh coconut. Fortunately he ends his description of this agonizing process by saying that using a food processor is allowed. Almost every recipe that he provides involves making a curry paste from scratch, a daunting process for which he grudgingly allows the use of a blender. “Be patient as you make a paste,” he cautions, “The blender, regrettably, was not created to make curry pastes and therefore may expire under such spicy exertions.” When he turns to recipes from the Muslim population of Southern Thailand, such as oxtail soup, he insists on freshly made curry powder for which he provides a list of ten ingredients, most of them ground on the spot. (Thank goodness, using “a clean coffee grinder” is okay.)

On one subject he is adamant. “A meal without rice is inconceivable.” He then provides the necessary components for a proper Thai meal: a relish, a soup, a curry, a salad (which, he says, is a “mistranslation” of what that dish truly--not the salad Westerners include in a meal but “ a lively assemblage of ingredients” whose “sprightliness adds savor and contrast”), and perhaps a simple stir-fried, grilled, or deep-fried dish. No need to worry about the food cooling before it’s served because “flavor is at its optimum just above room temperature.”

In spite of his royalist leanings, Thompson is remarkably generous with recipes for street snacks, dishes made by more plebeian mortals, and ones that have migrated from other countries. He tells how to make Chiang Mai sausage and its distant cousin that comes from the Northeast. He gives recipes for dishes that are clearly spawned from poverty--minced rabbit curry and curried fish innards (the innards are discarded after making a stock but even so, the name does startle.) He divulges secrets that aren’t commonly known--a convenient source for prepared spices is any Chinese medicine shop, since these are regarded as medicinal and are kept in wooden apothecary drawers.

All of this is embellished with stunning food photography, full-page and in color, almost suitable for framing and definitely appetite-enhancers. Thompson concludes with an extensive bibliography, six pages of sources written in English and four pages that list cookbooks and memorial books that are available only in Thai.

Thompson wrote this to create a record of food that might easily succumb to global influences and modernization. He succeeded. His passion is contagious and his writing is absolutely delightful, while providing an invaluable tutorial in what Thai food has been and what it may no longer be again. ~Janet Brown