Alvah's Books

Like many people, I’ve been spending time lately with Roberto Bolaño’s enormous posthumous novel “2666.” The book is strange and wonderful in all sorts of ways, not least because I can’t think of any other novel in which so many meals are consumed while being so little described.

In the 150-page opening section, four lovelorn literary scholars zip around the world, trying to find a fugitive author and (I think you’d have to say) themselves. They’re always away from home and going out for meals in bars, restaurants, trattorias, taverns and in one case a “Lilliputian” cafeteria. But what do they eat? I have very little idea.

Most of these meals aren’t described at all, and even when certain items are mentioned — a taco here, sausage and potatoes there — there’s no attempt to evoke any sense of how the meal looked, tasted or smelled. I find this curious. I also find it a tremendous relief. Haven’t we all read too many novels in which authors go to town describing meals in sumptuous, elaborate detail, in some cases even giving us the recipes?

It’s all very well for Bob Cratchit and his family to sit down to a Christmas goose whose “tenderness and flavor, size and cheapness” were “the themes of universal admiration.” But since I’m likely to be reading this while sitting alone on the couch sustained only by instant coffee, I tend to develop a bad case of food envy. It’s a lot like sex, I think. I don’t want characters in novels to eat better than I do, any more than I want them to have better sex lives than I do.

To read the rest of the essay, click on the title.