- Paperback: 160 pages
- Publisher: WW Norton; Reprint edition (April 26 2001)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0393321797
- ISBN-13: 978-0393321791
- Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12.7 x 1 cm
- Shipping Weight: 159 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,052,076 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
Each winter Philippe Cabassac taps through the undergrowth on his estate, murmuring entreaties to lei mousco, or flies. Drawn by the rich scent of truffles, flies lay their eggs in the loose topsoil, and Cabassac uses their presence to dig for the mysterious delicacy he calls "far more carnal, fleshy, gamelike than anything vegetal." And in this case, these black truffles have a strange additional power, one that gives Cabassac's hunt a special urgency: eating them brings on dreams of his dead wife, Julieta.
Approaching 50, the hero of The Fly-Truffler is a solidly built linguistics professor whose pet subject is the dying Provençal dialect. He lives in a dilapidated farmhouse, the family home for eight generations, selling off a parcel of land each year in order to make ends meet. Every sale is a kind of small betrayal, for Cabassac's roots in the Provençal landscape run deep. Like his ancestors, he goes "truffling every winter, gathering wild asparagus in the spring, flowering medicinal herbs each summer, and a plethora of pale, speckled mushrooms each fall." He belongs there as utterly as his young wife belonged nowhere.
Julieta was the most enigmatic of Cabassac's students. A tall, aquiline-nosed orphan, she grasped at the Provençal dialect as if by doing so she could forge herself an identity and a history. Their marriage was brief yet, for Cabassac, idyllic. Now, in eating the rich flesh of truffles, he seems to exchange "one buried thing for another." Desperate to prolong his nighttime contact with Julieta, he soon neglects teaching, his estate, and indeed all the obligations of his waking life--except for hunting the keys to the underworld where his wife dwells. As pungent and rich as one of Cabassac's truffle omelets, poet Gustaf Sobin's novel is a lyrical meditation on loss, love, and memory, as well as a vivid portrait of Provençal life. --Lisa Gee --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Publishers Weekly
Sobin--a poet, novelist (Venus Blue) and longtime resident of Provence--breathlessly evokes the dying language and haunting beauty of that bucolic French province in his shimmering novel. Philippe Cabassac, a dedicated Provencal and professor of the nearly extinct language, is the gloomy middle-aged protagonist of this tale of obsessive desire. He fly-truffles every winter, hunting the wooded hills of his ancestral farmland for truffles by marking the location where the flies, those "golden keys," lay their eggs. Grieving over the untimely death two years before of his beloved wife, Julieta (she was a young student in his class), Cabassac has made the gradual and thrilling discovery that the ingestion of truffles creates a state of receptivity to nightly visitations by her. With each successive, sensuous dream, Cabassac comes closer to discovering the secret Julieta needs to impart. Obsessed with unearthing that odoriferous tuber, "the agent of epiphanous visions," Cabassac invites his dreams to consume his real life and he all but signs away his patrimony--his land and the ramshackle farmhouse where he grew up and only he and his aged aunt are left to inhabit. Sobin's prose is dense and aromatic, his descriptions gorgeously verging on the purple. Through flashbacks, Cabassac recalls the meeting and courtship of the strangely passive object of desire, Julieta, whose "amorphous immensities" the linguistics professor longs to fill "with every articulated cell of his being." Through a series of dazzling associations, she comes to embody the spirit of the land Cabassac adores: the "wild, resinous stands of pinewood," "salted meats hanging from rafters," "chaff flying like sparks in a high wind" and on and on. Sobin is deeply in his element, borrowing gothic strains from Edgar Allan Poe, and the more carried away he becomes, the more deliriously rich the reader's feast. (Jan.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
First Sentence
HE'D TAKE THE SAME PATH, NOW, nearly every morning. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
HE'D TAKE THE SAME PATH, NOW, nearly every morning. Read the first page
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Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
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Most helpful customer reviews
3.0 out of 5 stars
Demanding,
By A Customer
This review is from: Fly Truffler (Hardcover)
This is a short little book that reads more like poetry than prose. I found the experience of reading this book a little like visting a museum of contemporary art -- you know it's got to be good, but you also sense that much of it is over your head. It's worth reading, but don't expect a light read -- it's short, but very dense and challenging.
3.0 out of 5 stars
Touching but Out of Touch,
By Joyce McGinnis (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Fly Truffler (Paperback)
Many readers will think this book is a beautiful fable. Perhaps they are right, and perhaps I am too literal a reader, but I have difficulty being charmed by a novel in which nobody can be both content and alive. Mr. Sobin writes very well (if somewhat repetitiously--he becomes attached to certain adjectives and then uses them endlessly), and his use of Old Provencal is fascinating, but the book left me with a hangover. It was an intoxicating experience, but one that lingered in unpleasant ways.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Black Diamonds,
This review is from: Fly Truffler (Hardcover)
Truffles can be said to be an obsession if only for the prices that people will pay to have them. Caviar is an inexpensive snack by comparison, I don't know what other product of Mother Nature competes. Part of the mystique that continues to surround this delicacy are the ways by which they are detected, and their elusiveness. In, "The Fly Truffler", the role of these buried treasures are an obsession, grantor of dreams, and ultimately destructive.A professor loses the love of his life but he is not allowed the normal release that grief, mourning, and time allow. He finds that as he continues the elaborate ritual from detecting the tiniest insect clues, to the digging, and the ritual of bottling the truffle with eggs for days before eating, he dreams, without fail of his lost love. The metaphors that surround his activities are many, not the least of which is his digging of individual truffles from the ground that holds what he has lost, and their ability to offer a bit at a time an intensifying second chance relationship. His former mate appears to him and becomes increasingly aware of his presence and then tempts him with information she must share. The problem is that only the truffle can bridge this gap between his world and hers, and truffles are rare at the best of times and are present for only a portion of the year. A period that is maddeningly short as he is tormented by these nocturnal trysts. An all consuming love can destroy a person's real world when all the participants are still amongst the living and can act as a painful reminder and tempting target for reconciliation or even retribution. In this tale there is no opportunity for either and the author takes apart this man's world with the same efficacy and devastation, even as he is alone. A love for one of nature's offerings becomes his obsession, as he attempts to unnaturally continue another love that nature has taken, what is gone, irrevocably.
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