Curry
Eating, Reading, and Race
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
There is no such thing as an ‘authentic’ curry – though everyone knows what curry tastes like, the defining characteristics of the Indian subcontinent’s biggest cultural export are slippery at best. The term covers a vast array of dishes, and so lends itself naturally to metaphor. In this provocative essay, Naben Ruthnum interrogates the weight of that metaphor. Beginning on the plate, where curry is a beguiling and vexing gastronomical entity, Ruthnum detours through the bookshelf, honing in on what he calls curryboooks – trope-ridden memoirs and novels of the South Asian diaspora, written for both brown readers and Western publishing markets. In analyzing Patak’s jarred kormas and Jhumpa Lahiri’s novels, Ruthnum argues persuasively to unburden not only curry but brownness itself from what Salman Rushdie once called an ‘imaginary homeland.’ It’s time, curry demonstrates, for food marketers, chefs, and writers to shed expectations rooted in a turmeric-tinged nostalgia. With a dash of memoir, a heaping spoon of literary analysis, and a good glug of cultural criticism, Ruthnum’s deep dive into how curry has become a faulty culinary synecdoche for brownness is positively delectable.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
For Toronto-based author Naben Ruthnum, curry is more than a category of food—it’s a Proustian trigger, a connection to his Mauritian roots, a cultural symbol. As a brown kid growing up on Canada’s west coast, Ruthnum also came to associate the concept of curry with the tropes that played out in popular South Asian diasporic fiction. In Curry, he coalesces these heady ideas into a multi-part book-length essay combining memoir, criticism, and cultural analysis. It’s a potent, deeply satisfying exploration of complex identities and representation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ruthnum, whose short fiction has won the Journey Prize, makes a ponderous contribution to Coach House's Exploded Views series of cultural critiques, using curry as a focus for his ruminations about place, belonging, and multiculturalism in Canada. Ruthnum uses the elusive definition of curry ("Curry isn't real. Its range of definitions, edible and otherwise, rob it of a stable existence") as a jumping-off point to discuss what he calls "curry books," books that he argues are defined by being written by South East Asian authors living in diaspora, such as Salman Rushdie, Shilpa Somaya Gowda, and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. Like the dish, Ruthnum argues that these books defy categorization. Ruthnum's explorations of both food and literature include insightful forays into nostalgia, authenticity, belonging, and the sense of in-between worlds in which the children of immigrants live. He argues that "there's typically also a generational divide, a bridge littered with pakoras and Reese's Pieces that cannot be crossed except with soulful looks and tangential arguments." Ultimately deciding that audience expectations engendered by past literary (and culinary) success are a heavy burden on present authors (and chefs), this essay seeks to push industry and audience alike to make space for the lost narratives, the ones that "go unread because of the dominance of the story we've heard before." This work serves as a rallying cry for emerging writers (including the author) to write those new, different stories.
