The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine by Alina Bronsky tells a darkly comic heart breaking story of three generations of Russian women living through the last days of the Soviet Union. The narrator is Rosalinda Achmetowna, a bitter woman full of contempt and hatred for just about everyone and everything. A lot of the fun of this delightful work is trying to see what truth there is in her many pronouncements. She is very abusive to her husband and is very verbally abusive to her daughter, Rosa, in her late teens when we meet her, calling her retarded while lamenting she will never find a man, a perpetual burden. The daughter shows up pregnant and Rosalinda accepts Rosa's claim it happened in a dream. There is an very gruesome abortion attempted by a neighbor lady, involving a long hat pin, which is seems to solve the problem but it doesn't. I needed a break after that section.
When Rosa's daughter is born, Rosalinda slowly comes to love her. Before she knows it, she schemes to steal the girl from Rosa who she regards as mentally unfit to be a mother. There are all sorts of crazy events set in a corrupt society.
There are numerous cool descriptions of Tarter cuisine.
I enjoyed this book a lot. I recently acquired in a flash sale a second book by Arlina Bronsky, Baba Dunja's Last Love, set in Chernoby and hope to post upon it in January.
Alina Bronsky
The Daily Beast calls Alina Bronsky "an exciting new voice in the literary world." Bronsky is the author of Broken Glass Park and The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine, which was named a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year. Born in Yekaterinburg, an industrial town at the foot of the Ural Mountains in central Russia, Bronsky now lives in Berlin... From Europa Editions
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