Land of Milk and Honey

Review: 4 stars

My older sister is a voracious reader; I think our “to be read” stacks could rival each other in height. I always love unwrapping her birthday gifts to me, which are inevitably thoughtful reads. ‘Land of Milk and Honey’ was one she gave me a few years ago, and I’m glad I finally got to it.

Pre-pandemic, my husband and I were restaurant aficionados. At times, we (annoyingly) lamented that we were “done” with Michelin restaurants, no longer shocked by avant-garde cuisine. We had become the characters in Netflix’s ‘The Menu’ - pretentious, exacting, and inured by foams and gels. C. Pam Zhang wrote this novel during the pandemic, when everyday pleasures and shared experiences felt fragile. By setting the story in a near-future world of scarcity, Zhang explores how survival, ethics, and pleasure collide - and how what we take for granted, like a beautiful meal, can expose what’s broken in the world.

The narrator is a poor, French-trained chef recruited by a reclusive billionaire and his daughter, Aida, to work at a mountaintop bio-sanctuary in Italy. Below them, the world has been choked by smog and ash; crops and biodiversity are gone, and most people survive on mung-protein flour. On the mountain, she prepares lavish meals from exotic and extinct ingredients - golden chimpanzees, mammoth, quail, truffles, lamb’s ears. “If the land of milk and honey produced no further milk, this meal proclaimed, then we would sup of the last like kings and queens.” These dinners are not just indulgence; they are fundraising performances for an elite list of donors hoping to buy their way into a future agricultural reserve.

She becomes intoxicated by this world of rare ingredients and excess, even cosplaying as Aida’s deceased mother to preside over fundraising dinners, lending them a spiritual gravity. She and Aida fall into a sensual, consuming relationship, which deepens her ethical unease about living in luxury while the rest of the world starves. At the center of the novel is the belief that wealth and ingenuity can always delay catastrophe; that money can keep pushing collapse one meal further away.

When Aida asks why the narrator trained in French cuisine, her answer is devastating in its honesty: “I refused to be stuck...in the smallness of my mother’s life. In a fixed notion of cooking, my abilities, my worth as ascribed to my Chineseness my Asianness my smallness my womanness my perpetual foreignness - myself. French cuisine is respected everywhere. To earn the chance to cook real food, I needed that respect.” That word - real - hangs over the novel like a dare. It evokes The Matrix question: would you rather live in a beautiful illusion or the raw grit of reality? How many honeyed figs or luscious gougères is truth worth?

Zhang’s writing is deeply immersive; you feel the textures of fat, salt, sugar, ash, and rot. Land of Milk and Honey is unsettling, indulgent, and quietly devastating. It leaves you with a lingering discomfort about what we consume, what we ignore, and what we’re willing to trade for our morality.

Catchpenny

Review: 4 stars

A week ago, I took my two children to the public library, and somehow managed to distract them enough to buy a few minutes to roam the adult floor. ‘Catchpenny’ was on a shelf of new books, and the premise of world redemption through witchcraft, suicide cults and a depressive anti-hero, was enough to catch my eye.

I settled in at one of my favourite coffee shops - Vereda Central Roasters - a few days later and launched headfirst into Charlie Huston’s cleverly constructed world. In his version of our today’s world, reflections can be “limned” from mirrors and transformed into real-life dopplegangers (albeit comprised of glass instead of flesh and blood.) Magic - or ‘mojo’ as it is referred to in the novel - is real. Raw emotions and revered rituals can birth powerful forces, which are channeled into inanimate objects - ‘curiosities’. This power can be tapped for many self-aggrandizing purposes, in addition to enabling travel between mirrors in disparate locations.

We meet Sid Catchpenny, our protagonist, as he is sought out by an estranged friend, Francois, to help a mother find her missing daughter, Circe. What ensues is a highly captivating and intricately woven thriller where we are constantly left wondering where the line between good and evil lies. Each of the countless characters - Monroe, Sue, Francois, Abigail, Circe, Carpenter, Sid - are desperately flawed, and also deeply misunderstood, adding to the complexity of assigning the roles of heroes and villains. Huston takes his time to unravel the twisted yarn connecting everyone, and in doing so, exposes to the reader that Sid, our guide through this narrative funhouse, fundamentally knows nothing…meaning we also know nothing until the climax of the novel.

I found the story well paced and easy to lose myself in. It was reminiscent of ‘The Matrix’ for me, with vocabulary and rules used to effectively cast the structure for an alternative reality. For example, the omnipresence of “mojo” throughout the story, establishing “courses” to direct the mojo to “vehemancers”, ‘manikins’ as the “limned” reflections, and the time-bound “Vestibule” in between mirrors. Sid is also a refreshing protagonist - self-deprecating, honest and a bit of a maverick. Popular cultural touchstones are catalysts of the plot and work very effectively to draw contemporary parallels to our current lived experiences - for example, Monroe’s parties are reminiscent of Woodstock or Coachella, Gyre is an interpretation of popular MMPORGs and youth’s timeless pursuit of meaning at all costs.

It was an excellent escapist read that also provoked discussion on how the power of emotion can be captured and used as a force. It asks whether apocalypse is evil, or if it can be seen as a renewal - the creation of something new from the dredges of a destabilizing and disintegrating world. And if renewal is possible, how can a new world order be constructed to be more equitable and selfless. ‘Catchpenny’ is definitely worth an exploration for a curious, fantasy-loving reader.

Your Utopia

Review: 3 stars

It certainly has been a while - almost 3 years since my last post. Given how hectic it is having 2 young kids and a demanding job, it has been difficult to steal away time to archive my reading. Given a relative lull in the chaos for the next few months, I recommitted to sharing my favourite (and not so favourite) reads.

I have been rediscovering the public library with my family, and visits to the Central Branch just minutes from our house have been nostalgic. I remember going with my sisters and my mom when I was younger, hungry for the endless possibilities and underrated gems found in the library stacks. I truly aspired to be a librarian when I “grew up”, mostly in hopes of unilaterally waiving all my overdue book fees. I came across ‘Your Utopia’ on the “New Books” shelf at my library. I was delighted because I have been wanting to read Bora Chung’s work since I saw her books featured in a display at Foyles in London. I also have been very intrigued by Asian translated literature and short stories as of late, so this was the perfect choice.

‘Your Utopia’ is a selection of futuristic vignettes that explore the relationship between technology and humans, and essentially where one ends and the other begins. The opener - “The Center for Immortality Research” - stylistically reminds me of the author’s voice in ‘The Sympathizer’. Our matter-of-fact narrator is a senior manager deep down the food chain at a pharma conglomerate’s immortality research centre. She finds herself in increasingly ludicrous situations ranging from fending off a National Assembly candidate (an immortality zealot), to aiding and abetting the theft of commemorative DVDs amidst a knife attack. I found myself laughing aloud in the coffee shop at the dry humour permeating the story, and lamenting how corporate life can feel like a life sentence - even for those who are not immortal.

My favourite stories were “An Ordinary Marriage” and “The End of the Voyage.” In the latter, a COVID-inspired Zombie affliction - ‘The Disease’ - sweeps Earth, and humanity’s last hope is to send into space a pod of scientists, engineers and military personnel to avoid infection. What ensues is an onslaught of dark, bloody fiction, culminating in spontaneous cannibalism, hyperspace travel and mutiny. While the plot itself is not novel (imagine The Walking Dead meets Star Trek), it is the confidence with which Chung propels the reader to evermore fantastical and disgusting corners. For me, it drew real parallels with the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when we secretly asked ourselves questions like" “Is it just easier to be part of the infected masses, instead of perpetually looking over your shoulder?” and “How much isolation can we get used to? Is our human tendency to adapt and survive a good thing?”.

While this read is not for everyone, I found the stories very entertaining, creative and thought provoking. I finished the book within a day. From a reader’s perspective, not every story was uniformly polished and the afterword from the author felt overly explanatory. However, on the whole, it left me curious to read Chung’s ‘Cursed Bunny’ - the more critically acclaimed sister to ‘Your Utopia’.