- Paperback: 152 pages
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC; New edition edition (2 Oct 2000)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0747549699
- ISBN-13: 978-0747549697
- Product Dimensions: 19.4 x 12.4 x 1.2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 471,888 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Philippe Cabassac is a 50-something, 200 pound plus "solidly built" linguistics professor, whose specialist subject is the dying Provençal dialect; his lectures are "luminous, captivating, memorable. Those who attended invariably fell under his spell." He lives in a dilapidated farmhouse, the family home for eight or more generations. Even though he lives cheaply, his part-time professor's salary doesn't cover his living expenses and so he sells off a parcel of land each year-- just enough to make ends meet.
Philippe belongs utterly to the Provençal country. 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, recently dead wife, belonged nowhere. Julieta was the most enigmatic of Philippe's students. A tall, raven-haired and aquiline- nosed orphan, she grasped at the Provençal dialect as if trying to graft her own life onto its genealogy, to forge herself an identity and history.
Their marriage was brief, yet for Philippe, idyllic. We meet him two years after Julieta's death, just as he's admitting to himself that those vivid, lucid dreams of Julieta come to him during the night after he's eaten one of the black truffles that he hunts down at first religiously, then, hungry for those dreams that reunite him with his dead wife, fanatically, and to the exclusion of all else.
This is a lyrical, poetic novel (the author is a poet) that packs all of life and death and decay into its 150 intense pages. --Lisa Gee --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
Imbibe this lush, luminous book as if it were a drug.--Albert Mobilio
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
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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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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
From beginning to end, the fly truffler is a simply beautiful novel. The images, smells and sounds so wonderfully described by this poet, make this tragic love story a pleasure to emerse oneself in. The kind of book you'll read in one sitting and once finished, wonder whether you've been dreaming those past few hours away. Lovely.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format: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.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
11 reviews
28 of 30 people found the following review helpful
Delectable
8 Mar 2000
Format:Hardcover
On December 31, 1999 my wife and I had a deliciously indulgent millennial dinner at March. The first course was a "beggar's purse" filled with truffles and topped with an edible shaving of 24-carat gold. (OK, so it was over-the-top indulgent.) This book by Gustaf Sobin reminded me of that first course: small, sensuous, exquisitely crafted, poetically expressive, unlike anything I had experienced before and celebratory of passages, of memory and moving on. "The Fly-Truffler" is Philippe Cabassac's elegy to his wife, Julieta, their intimate romance and her tragic death. But, most of all, it is an elegy to the passing of local languages and customs, to the loss of the simple country life. The poetic heart of the book is Philippe's recognition that Julieta is the embodiment of Haut Provence followed by the erotically charged consummation of their love by a waterfall, a memory ultimately restored through truffles. When you are finished with this appetizer, I would recommend "The Rings of Saturn" by W.G. Sebald as a second course of what is slowly becoming a literary feast of moving millennial contemplations.
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Poetic and sensual
5 April 2000
Format:Hardcover
A perfect moment of storytelling -- to be read in one sitting, thus inducing a dreamlike sense of place, love, loss and inspiration.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
A book for language lovers
7 Jun 2001
Format:Paperback
This novel is written in four chapters - the second chapter, the story of a philology professor's romance with a student only justifies the cost of the book. Sobin's understanding of language - words as objects to be enjoyed, the importance of silence, of absent words - is remarkable. (You may note some similarities to Edmond Jabes.)
Sobin's understanding of a person's rootedness in place and the effects of loss of place is another thread expression through the professor's estate of many generations, his cousin's emigration and his wife's orphanhood.
At one point, the plot of the novel fails, becoming contrived but the grace and depth of the prose makes a reader ready to forgive the slip.
An enjoyable novel with depth.
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