Curry
Eating, Reading and Race
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
No two curries are the same. Curry asks why the dish is supposed to represent everything brown people eat, read, and do.
Curry is a dish that doesn’t quite exist, but, as this wildly funny and sharp essay points out, a dish that doesn’t properly exist can have infinite, equally authentic variations. By grappling with novels, recipes, travelogues, pop culture, and his own upbringing, Naben Ruthnum depicts how the distinctive taste of curry has often become maladroit shorthand for brown identity.
With the sardonic wit of Gita Mehta’s Karma Cola and the refined, obsessive palette of Bill Buford’s Heat, Ruthnum sinks his teeth into the story of how the beloved flavour calcified into an aesthetic genre that limits the imaginations of writers, readers, and eaters.
Following in the footsteps of Salman Rushdie's Imaginary Homelands, Curry cracks open anew the staid narrative of an authentic Indian diasporic experience.
Naben Ruthnum won the prestigious Canadian Journey Prize. Text will publish his first thriller, Find You In The Dark, written under the pseudonym of Nathan Ripley, in April 2018.
‘Ruthnum picks apart Jhumpa Lahiri, Rohinton Mistry, Daniyal Mueenudin, Shoba Narayan, Madhur Jaffrey, and Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle with a thoughtful ambivalence that exhibits an admirable intellectual honesty…It’s fun to watch him think.’ Toronto Star
‘In Curry: Eating, Reading and Race, Ruthnum has written a curry book—the word ‘curry’ certainly appears more times than one could count—but it’s one where he explores what it means to be a brown person on his own terms. It’s not a brown nostalgia tale. There are no mangoes. There are no scattered cardamom seeds…By defying what ingredients he’s expected to put into his curries, what he’s expected to read and what he should write about, Ruthnum issues to other brown writers a call to arms to break out of the box that the west insists on putting them in.’ Lifted Brow
‘Drawing parallels between food and literature, Ruthnum writes incisively about the danger of letting a singular narrative abound when it’s a narrative that creates stereotypes and feeds tired notions of what it means to be part of the Indian diaspora…But by playing the messy notions of what a curry is or isn’t, Ruthnum has penned his own curry book, albeit one that tells the story of what it means to be a brown person on his own terms without pandering to external preconceptions of what South Asian writing should be.’ Big Issue
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.
