Category: The Novel

Food: the immigrant’s experience

A few weeks ago I blogged about Andrea Levy’s Windrush novel Small Island and the use she makes of food to signal the discomfort and alienation the Jamaican immigrant Hortense feels in post-war London as she struggles to make a typical English dish – egg and chips.

Food plays a similarly important role in the immigration experience of the protagonist of Colm Toibin’s novel Brooklyn. Winner of the 2009 Costa novel award, Brooklyn tells of the young Eilis Lacey who leaves her small provincial town in 1950s Ireland, where work is scarce, to travel to Brooklyn in New York to make a new life.  Continue reading “Food: the immigrant’s experience”

Food and memory

As I’ve already discussed in previous posts, food and memory are inextricably bound up together.

In Lark Rise to Candleford (1945), her autobiographical account of her Oxfordshire childhood, Flora Thompson’s food memories evoke the old custom and habits of a world that has long since disappeared and the delight of being a child at this time. Continue reading “Food and memory”

Food and alienation

I said, ‘Excuse me. I will ask you something if I may. Can you perchance tell me…’ I raised my head to look upon her in the eye and asked, ‘How do you make a chip?’ (Andrea Levy, Small Island) Continue reading “Food and alienation”

Cooking for the clergy

With Covid-19 raging through nearly every country in the world right now, it would probably be appropriate for me to devote a post to ‘pandemic literature’ (perhaps Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year [1722] or Albert Camus’ The Plague [1947]). However, I suspect that, if food is referenced, it is far from tasty, and I also think that, at times like this, we might need to seek solace in a different type of literature. Continue reading “Cooking for the clergy”