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A review by jennyyates
The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine by Alina Bronsky
3.0
Wow, what a character! I love books about feisty older women, and the narrator of this very funny novel, Rosalinda Achmetowna, is in a class by herself. Rosalinda, a Tartar living in Russia, is confidence embodied, a woman who knows what to do in every situation, who never falters. And you can sympathize with her detractors too – which include her daughter and granddaughter at times - because Rosalinda is one pushy broad, with absolutely no concept of boundaries.
This isn’t a book where the heroine wins through all the time. She loses plenty too, and she can’t always control everything, much as she tries. In the Russia she lives in, there are acute shortages of everything. But sitting around crying is a waste of time for Rosalinda; she makes a decision and moves on to the next thing. About halfway through the book, she emigrates to Germany, and I found the cultural contrasts very telling (and familiar to me, since I was also an ex-pat in Germany for a while).
Much of the novel centers around Rosalinda’s fascination for her granddaughter and her attempts to keep her near and help her become a smaller version of Rosalinda herself. In the course of this, she tries to orchestrate her daughter’s life, and has a hand in her three marriages. We also enjoy Rosalinda’s high-handed but ultimately practical approaches to sex and work.
This isn’t a book where the heroine wins through all the time. She loses plenty too, and she can’t always control everything, much as she tries. In the Russia she lives in, there are acute shortages of everything. But sitting around crying is a waste of time for Rosalinda; she makes a decision and moves on to the next thing. About halfway through the book, she emigrates to Germany, and I found the cultural contrasts very telling (and familiar to me, since I was also an ex-pat in Germany for a while).
Much of the novel centers around Rosalinda’s fascination for her granddaughter and her attempts to keep her near and help her become a smaller version of Rosalinda herself. In the course of this, she tries to orchestrate her daughter’s life, and has a hand in her three marriages. We also enjoy Rosalinda’s high-handed but ultimately practical approaches to sex and work.