The Reader Travels

Anthony Burgess was just cool — a world traveler, linguist, novelist and thinker. In 1962 he wrote two different novels about crazy future worlds, the most popular, of course, being A Clockwork Orange because Stanley Kubrick went off and made a movie about it.

While I think Clockwork is thought provoking and a great display of Burgess’s linguistic talents, my favorite of the two dystopic novels is The Wanting Seed. With all its closet heterosexuals, warfare and cannibalism, what’s not to like?

Much like the father and son in The Road, our main character travels the countryside when his world falls apart back home. But his countrymen haven’t turned savage. They’re still proper Englishmen, and as such, they politely call what they’re eating, “meat,” and pretend to themselves there’s nothing untoward about it.

Of course, some might argue it’s not much worse than what Englishmen eat today. Before I traveled to the UK two years ago, I got plenty of warnings about how bad the food was. Granted, there wasn’t much appreciation for leafy green vegetables in the pubs where we found ourselves eating most meals, but I actually liked the food — meat pies, sausages, potatoes, fried fish, good comfort food, all of it.

I was also reassured by the pig and sheep farms we passed by in Suffolk County. It’s still nice to know where your meat is coming from.

I read The Road during the 2009 road trip travels. In this post-apocolyptic world, the father-son duo travels across country in search of cans and crumbs of food to keep themselves alive. And while they’re searching, they have to keep from being eaten by all the crazies on the road.

So I’m still debating about seeing the movie.  I’m always interested to see how a movie adaptation captures the real themes of a book and how it changes to feed trends and the appetites of movie watchers. I try to not to be appalled by how they “ruined” it or how the author might have “sold out.” I only observe the choices made to get them from the book to the movie, eternally fascinated by human behavior and market drivers.

Going back to Chocolat, I thought it was quite interesting that they changed the chocolatier’s nemesis from a priest to a town mayor. Maybe they didn’t want to upset the Pope, or maybe it just wasn’t politically correct to show priests in such a bad light. They also played up the romance angle, which is just the thing to do in Hollywood. I’m not judging. After all, the key to marketing is to know your audience.

Sure I’d be interested to see what they did with The Road to make it appeal to American movie-goers. Since the book is short and fairly thin on plot, I’d think it would be easy to adapt. The cameras need something to focus on, so I’m guessing they played up the apocolypse and the violence. That’s what movie-goers want, right?  I’m not opposed to a bit of movie action, but I’m still not sure I want to see it.

Don’t get me wrong, I did like the book.  The problem is that I’m not sure I want to be in that world again. It didn’t taste very good.

Over lunch with my man yesterday, I was feeling a little insecure when I said, “Sometimes I feel like I’m normal.” Then he answered, “Do normal people obsess over cannibalism while discussing food?” And that reassured me. I’m feeling much better now.

We were discussing survival cannibalism before, and my mother-in-law brought up Cabeza de Vaca, Spanish explorer who toured the coast of Texas in the 1500s, checking out the local lifestyles and cuisine. While the explorer observed a few different types of ritual cannibalism among the natives, his hosts were completely disgusted when learning that a part of the expedition party stranded on an island with no food had resorted to eating each other to survive.

Cabeza de Vaca called it Isla de Malhado, or Island of Misfortune, and there is debate over exactly where this island was on the Texas coast. Many historians believe it was Galveston Island, but some debate that it was Bolivar Penninsula, while others claim it’s a little further west at San Luis Island. Either way, I’m sure I’ve stepped foot on the Isla de Malhado, having grown up in Galveston County, Texas, stomping along the coast line from Beaumont to Freeport.

I’m suddenly feeling nostalgic for home. I think I’ll stick to the seafood, though.

A friend asked me when I was going to stop dwelling on the morbid and start talking about something lighter, perhaps the erotic aspects of food. The problem is that I have a certain goal in mind, and I’m just not there yet. There are two more books to cover on the topic of cannibalism before we reach the climax, and yet, we need some sort of release, a breath, before we can go on.

I just finished reading Chocolat by Joanne Harris, so it only seems right to flow in the wind with Vianne. She blows through town bringing a little taste of joy and freedom. From the first words of the book, everything is delicious. “We came on the wind of the carnival. A warm wind for February, laden with the hot greasy scents of frying pancakes and sausages and powdery sweet waffles cooked on the hot plate right there by the roadside…”

Her air infects the ascetic with temptation. His thoughts become beautiful even as he rails against their ugliness, “I feel the insidious creeping of doubt in my mind, and my mouth fills at the memory of its perfume, like cream and marshmallow and burnt sugar and the heady mingling of cognac and fresh-ground cocoa beans. It is the scent of a woman’s hair, just where the nape joins the skull’s tender hollow, the scent of ripe apricots in the sun, of warm brioche and cinnamon rolls, lemon tea and lily of the valley.”

Ah, this one is worth tasting, again and again.