In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers.

Photo: Erica MacLean.

Geek Love, Katherine Dunn’s 1989 novel about a family of circus performers, was one of my favorite books in college. I’d memorized the opening lines, in which Al Binewski extols his wife’s grace in biting off chicken heads, and used to get drunk and murmur them to boys at parties:

“When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets,” Papa would say, “she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing. ‘Spread your lips, sweet Lil,’ they’d cluck, ‘and show us your choppers!’”

This worked as a seduction technique—a testament either to the popularity of Geek Love or the ease of college hookups.

Today, Geek Love’s portrayal of people with physical disabilities might provoke unease. The main character, Olympia, was “an albino hunchback dwarf,” her brother Arturo the Aqua Boy had flippers for hands and feet, and her daughter Miranda did well as a fetish stripper, thanks to her arousing little tail. Al and Lil had deliberately bred their children so as to enhance their carnival act. But what I remember most about the book is that from Al’s first mythologizing words, Dunn showed that she understood trauma and celebrated difference. She suggested that—no matter how much damage we might sustain—familial love, safety, and acceptance was possible.

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Photo: Erica MacLean.

Today, the Eat Your Words kitchen plunges into controversy with Mikhail Sholokhov (1905–1984), the Russian known as Joseph Stalin’s favorite writer, whose greatest work is And Quiet Flows the Don. This book—if it can be called a book, and not an item of propaganda, or possibly a plagiarism, or at least a contested territory—was published in serial format from 1925 to 1932, and then was completed with a final volume in 1940. In the end it comprised four “books” concerning a cast of characters based in the Don Cossack region of Russia (now in Ukraine), set in a time period starting around 1912, before the outbreak of World War I, and continuing through the Russian Revolution and the Russian Civil War. Sholokhov was known as “the Red Tolstoy,” and people often love the book for its qualities as a historical epic. When I first read it, while living in Moscow in my twenties, I found it useful in bringing the complex politics and military phases of the era to life. But the qualities that have brought me back over the years are the same ones that made the novel such a sensation in its time: the freshness and vividness of its portrayal of village life.

The first section of And Quiet Flows the Don is unforgettable in this sense. It centers on the Melekhov family, known in their village as Turks because the main patriarch’s mother was a Turkish woman brought home by the patriarch’s father as a plunder of war (and later accused of witchcraft and beaten to death by the other villagers). The patriarch, Pantelimon, has a son, Gregor, who develops a passion for Aksinia, his neighbor’s wife, and she for him. This passion arises against the unhappily married Aksinia’s will. The book declares: “Without consciously desiring it, resisting the feeling with all her might, she noticed that on Sundays and week-days she was attiring herself more carefully. Making pretexts to herself, she sought to place herself more frequently in his path. She was happy to find Gregor’s black eyes caressing her heavily and rapturously.”

The feelings are recognizable to anyone who has ever had a forbidden passion, but the details are enchantingly particular. One evening Gregor and Aksinia are thrown together while Gregor’s father takes advantage of a thunderstorm to go out fishing with nets (the fish are afraid of thunder and cluster by the banks). On the way home, Aksinia gets cold, so Gregor suggests they stop to shelter in the past year’s haystack, which is warm “like a stove” in the middle. Most modern readers, like me, wouldn’t have known that old haystacks are warm inside. The hay smells “warm and rotten,” yet Gregor, lying next to Aksinia within it, notices the “tender, agitating” scent that comes from her hair. “Your hair smells like henbane—you know, the white flower,” he says, before trying to kiss her. Aksinia escapes and jumps out of the haystack. We’re told that as she stands, adjusting her kerchief, steam rises from her wet clothes and now-warm body in the cold air. All of these tiny, sensual details bring the scene to life. There’s a wild folk beauty to the Russian-Ukrainian countryside that’s all its own—and is visible to this day—and the book captures it. Read More

Photo: Erica MacLean.

The introduction to Mariners, Castaways and Renegades, a 1953 work on Herman Melville by the activist, critic, and novelist C. L. R. James (1901–1989), is electrifying to the Melville lover. It starts with an indelible line: “The miracle of Herman Melville is this: that a hundred years ago in two novels, Moby-Dick and Pierre, and two or three stories, he painted a picture of the world in which we live, which is to this day unsurpassed.” That’s a huge claim, but readers of Moby-Dick know it to be as true today as it was when James’s book was first published. James goes on to write that “a great part” of the volume he is introducing was produced while he was held in detention by the immigration authorities on Ellis Island as he was being deported from the U.S. On Ellis Island he found, “like Melville’s Pequod … a miniature of all the nations of the world and all sections of society,” and he synthesized his American experience with the themes and insights of Moby-Dick. I’ve written recently about Moby-Dick’s significance to modern discussions of race, and I was pleased to come across the scholarship of James, one of the novel’s great interpreters, who was neither white nor American but born on Trinidad when it was a British colony. If Melville shows America as multiracial and entwined, James pans out to show it also as hopelessly entangled in the whale lines of the greater world.

Deservedly, James’s work is undergoing a revival at the moment. His only novel, Minty Alley, was reissued earlier this year as part of Bernardine Evaristo’s series with Penguin Books, Black Britain: Writing Back. His other major works include The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, a still-authoritative history of the world’s only successful slave-led revolution, and Beyond a Boundary, a study on cricket and culture that has been called one of the greatest sports books of all time as well as an important entry in the discourse of postcolonialism. Even many of his minor works are back in print. Read More

Please join Valerie Stivers and Hank Zona for virtual Undset-themed drinks on Friday, June 4, at 6 P.M. on The Paris Review’s Instagram account. For more details, visit our events page, or scroll down to the bottom of the article.

Photo: Erica MacLean.

The most common food in the medieval historical romance Kristin Lavransdatter, written by the Norwegian author Sigrid Undset (1882–1949), is oatmeal porridge, a dish I made elaborate perfection of during my children’s early years. The porridges in Undset’s book are good and nourishing but plain (though in one scene, a young Kristin eats hers with “thick cream” off her father’s spoon). Mine, on the other hand, were ridiculous. I blitzed half the oats in the baby-food blender before cooking. I tried different combinations of milk and water. I made fruit puree swirls. I had a two-year-old daughter, an infant son, and an office job, to which I fled every day in great relief to get a moment to myself and then struggled not to leak breast milk on my work clothes. My husband was unhelpful with the children. Childless people found my travails boring and embarrassing. I’d never thought being a woman mattered much, but suddenly it seemed to. I was miserable, and perfecting the oatmeal made me feel better.

Kristin Lavransdatter, which unfolds over the course of three volumes—The Wreath, The Wife, and The Cross—is a woman’s story. It’s also a gripping read and an impressive feat of historical re-creation, which helped Undset win the 1928 Nobel Prize in Literature. The epic’s structural and textual allusions are so numerous that, as the professor Sherrill Harbison dryly remarks in her introduction to The Cross, they “show no signs of being exhausted by scholars.” (She also—correctly, I feel—thinks the book is overlooked.) When writing Kristin Lavransdatter, Undset drew from sagas, ballads, Scandinavian oral tradition, and medieval texts of all types, notably the allegory Le roman de la rose, to tell the tale of a woman in the early fourteenth century, a time when society was changing for women, who takes her newish right to consent to her own marriage a step further and demands her own choice of husband. Not accidentally, Undset was writing in the 1920s, another time of rapid social change. Read More

Please join Valerie Stivers and Hank Zona for a virtual, Melville-themed wine tasting on Friday, May 7, at 6 P.M. on The Paris Review’s Instagram account. For more details, visit our events page, or scroll down to the bottom of the article.

Photo: Erica MacLean.

Whenever I would tell someone I was cooking from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick for my next column, they would gleefully shriek, “Whale steaks!” And I would dither a bit and explain that no, those are illegal in America, and that I was instead planning to make two forms of chowder, clam and cod, that weren’t going to be very different from each other. In our Chowhound-fueled, extreme-eating kind of world, I felt a little silly. Chowder is an easy dish, and while there’s raging conflict over the primacy of New York style (tomato-based) versus New England style (white), and the finer variations of each, the topic seems to inspire passion in inverse proportion to its importance. (Potatoes or no potatoes? Avast.) In fact, as Perry Miller reports in The Raven and the Whale: Poe, Melville, and the New York Literary Scene, Melville meant for Moby-Dick’s chapter on chowder to be a sardonic response to just such an ongoing foodie feud. (Many thanks to the novelist Caleb Crain for loaning me Miller’s book and writing two excellent essays on Melville, sexuality, and cannibalism, published in A Journal of Melville Studies and American Literature.)

Moby-Dick, however, is a book in which pulling on a single thread can reveal a universe. I had some contact with it in my all-girls middle school—to my recollection, just enough to ask why this book had dick in the title and so many mentions of “sperm” in its pages—but it’s only as an adult that I’ve fallen madly in love. I understand it now as a “lifelong meditation on America,” as the Melville biographer Andrew Delbanco writes in his introduction to the edition I own. So when I looked at the book’s two main food passages—one on chowder, the other on eating whale—I found a central theme: the question of what man (specifically gendered man) is doing here in America, what he’s cooking up, and how it nourishes him. In this system, eating chowder is on the side of our better nature, and eating whale is on the side of our worst, so I felt a little better about my dinner plans. Read More

In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers.

Photo: Erica MacLean.

Lately, when I think about jealousy or, shall I admit it, when I feel jealous, I remind myself of the story “The Earthgod and the Fox,” by the Japanese writer Kenji Miyazawa (1896–1933). When I think about politics, I consider Miyazawa’s story “The Fire Stone.” For my artistic practice, there’s “Gorsch the Cellist”; for my place in nature, “The Bears of Nametoko.” I can’t say there’s a Miyazawa story for everything—the writer died young and lived nearly a century ago in rural northern Japan—but he had stories for many of our basic human vices, and for our basic forms of goodness, too. And this only scratches the surface of his work’s appeal.

Miyazawa was born in 1896, the son of two pawnbrokers in the town of Hanamaki in the rural Iwate Prefecture. His parents were pious Buddhists and wealthy people by local standards; their son became a teacher of agricultural science and a social activist who attempted to improve the lot of farmers in his region. His poetry and fiction were not celebrated or even much published in his lifetime, but word spread posthumously, and he is now one of Japan’s foremost writers, widely taught in schools. When I decided to cook from Miyazawa’s work, I asked Tetsuro Hoshii, a Japanese acquaintance who lives in my Brooklyn neighborhood, to help me with the menu, and he revealed excitedly that he was named after a tribute to a Miyazawa novel—that’s how brightly the writer’s star continues to shine, almost a century after his death. Read More