A review by kirsten0929
The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine by Alina Bronsky

3.0

[2010] (Translated from German) This woman has to be one of the most destructive characters in contemporary literature. I think she does love and I think she thinks she shows it, but she just shows it in unrecognizable ways. And if it’s unrecognizable, does it count? I won’t say if I waited in vain or not, but I waited a long time to find out what happened to make her this way. An unreliable narrator of the first degree. Physical abuse, pedophilia, psychological and mental cruelty, negative cultural stereotyping, political incorrectness, megalomania and more, occurred throughout and I found it jarring every time. But I gotta give props to the author for fitting all that and a little humor into 262 pages. There’s something to be said for consistency in a character, and she was that, for sure, but at the expense of personal growth? To me the character remained flat throughout. But she was a survivor, you gotta give ol’ Rosa that. One of her few redeeming characteristics.