Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love

By Lara Vapnyar

Pantheon Books, June 2008, $20

The comingled complexities of love and food are familiar ingredients in modern fiction, but in Lara Vapnyar’s new collection of short stories it is largely the absence of love that is assuaged or intensified by cooking and eating. Like Vapnyar herself, the protaganists of Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love are émigres from Eastern Europe, cast dazedly adrift in the United States, suspended between assimilation and homesickness. Varying in age, gender and preoccupations, the characters nonetheless share an air of stunned dismay, a somnambulant passivity akin to depression. In each of these six elegantly crafted stories, it is the experience, memory or consequences of a meal that in some way bring them back to life.
Vapynar left her native Russia in 1994 and became fluent in English only after settling in New York. She drew on the immigrant experience in her first collection of short stories, the critically acclaimed There Are Jews in My House, and her subsequent novel, The Memoirs of a Muse. Here she continues to address displacement, loneliness and loss of status with wry humour and lightness of touch, sidestepping sentimentality and inviting genuine sympathy for her disenfranchised characters; isolated individuals slaving to send money to their aspirational families back home; scientists, artists and intellectuals turned into computer programmers in the heat of the melting pot.
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