Customer Reviews

Corked: A Memoir

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(13)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

Here in the age of reality television, hordes of wanna-be "performers" believe that the willingness to shamelessly display their most obnoxious character flaws and/or to humiliate themselves on a public stage will provide the raw material for instant celebrity and success. Despite their lack of any discernible raw talent or special skill, these folks want to be famous. Anything from insect eating to incest to giving birth to eight babies to falsely reporting your kid is in the stratosphere in a homemade weather balloon seems to do the trick. The same mentality now appears to be the stuff of "literature." This book may be the latest exemplar of the "reality writing" movement, if there is such a thing.

The book is, in a word, abominable.

While "Corked" would seem at first glance to be a book about wine, or wine-related travel, please trust me, it is nothing of the kind. There is little information or insight into wine or traveling in French wine country to be found here. Even the scant time, effort and writing that is devoted to wine seems always to be more about the narrator (or the author?) than it is about wine and winemakers. Indeed, while the cover touts the book as a tale of the "wine trip to end all wine trips," the book perfunctorily describes a brief visit and tasting with a winemaker in Alsace, another in Burgundy, another in the Rhone and yet another in Languedoc. That's it for the "wine trip," apparently. (I know from experience that the four or five brief domaine visits described here would easily be accomplished in half a day or a day, not counting the travel time required to hop from one region to the next as Borel did).

On the subject of wine, Ms. Borel lost me somewhere around page 30, where she announces that "there are five Grand Cru producers of wine in the Bordeaux region of France." She is apparently talking about the "First Growth" Bordeaux estates -- Latour, Lafite, Margaux and Haut-Brion, plus Mouton added in 1973 -- the Cote d'Or being the home of the thirty-two "grands crus," not Bordeaux. Let's not sweat the small stuff. Remember, this book really isn't about wine, it's about Kathryn.

The remainder of the book (and apparently the two week "wine trip to end all wine trips" it supposedly describes) is devoted to over the top histrionics, temper tantrums, fits of shrieking and crying, a threatened suicide/homicide by auto, navel gazing (literal and figurative) and vomiting (again, literal and figurative). What we soon discover is that Kathryn (whether a fictional character or the author, or a "fictionalized" variation on the author, is never quite clear) is a very selfish, needy, grasping and maddeningly puerile creature. I did not need or want to read about all of this but, as a dutiful Amazon Vine reviewer, I forced myself to read this book from cover to cover, ruining what might have been a perfectly good holiday weekend evening. Just to assure you I am not making this stuff up, a bit more detail about the contents of the book follows.

The book is entitled "Corked - A Memoir," so one must believe that what we are reading is autobiographical, although there are certainly recent examples of "memoirs" that have turned out to be mostly exaggeration, if not outright fiction. Reading this book, I found myself hoping -- for Kathryn Borel's sake -- that the author is indeed creating a fictionalized version of herself to serve as the narrative voice in the book. In the absence of any biographical information concerning Ms. Borel in the "advance reading copy" I received from Amazon, I popped the author's name into Google and it appears, alas, that what we read may be mostly true - because Ms. Borel has given us her very own internet video "pitch" for the book that indicates what we see in the book is Ms. Borel's own story, in her own words. The "voice" that we hear in the text may not be an artifice - the author and the narrator may indeed be one and the same. I would like to give Kathryn Borel the benefit of the doubt and continue to believe she must be a far more reasonable, compassionate and thinking adult than the whining adolescent narrator she has invented for this failed attempt to create "literature."

The reported genesis of the book and Ms. Borel's "search for meaning": Borel killed an elderly man by running him down in her car as he attempted to cross the street with a sack of groceries, while she and her then boyfriend ("Peter") were on their way to deliver booze and mixers for a party. (And, as every client tells her DUI attorney, she wasn't drinking -- but of course). As this book would have it, our narrator is the victim. The old man may be dead, but he got off easy, because she has suffered untold damage to her psyche, through no fault of her own but for the luck of the draw. Forget that in a subsequent full blown temper tantrum, documented in detail in this volume, she threatens more violent death with an auto. This book is her catharsis. Would that she had not shared it with me.

Killing someone supposedly has given Borel (or her fictional narrator) her first taste of mortality. That in turn made her want to bond with her father, who is in his sixties and, can you imagine, may die someday. To accomplish this "bonding," she and dad go on this whirlwind French wine tour. Along the way, we learn how her dad cleans his ears, how she likes to pick her navel and sniff her fingers afterwards. We get exquisite detail concerning her dad's bout of food poisoning. Alas, I am not making this up, it is all part of the death march one must endure to finish this book. Above all else, we learn over and over again that when others are suffering, Kathryn (whether in real life or as "fictionalized" for this book) is at her worst -- yowling, childish, needy and demanding. It's all about her.

Over and over again, while Borel is supposedly "bonding" with dad, her narrative makes it quite clear that she doesn't really want to hear what he has to say at all - she wants him to LISTEN TO HER. We also learn that Kathryn can YELL, and does so a lot. What we have here is, in essence, the diary of a neurotic, narcisstic, melodramatic and mostly hysterical woman of indeterminate age - perhaps in her 30s? - who remains mired in an adolescent search for affirmation from her father, acting out in ways I would not tolerate for a second from my own nine year old daughter.

Thus, much of the book consists of breathless and barely articulate ranting and raving. Seemingly aware of the inadequacy of her writing and the banality of what she has to say, the author attempts to wring greater impact from the words on the page through the liberal use of italics and, when those don't seem to do the trick, by CAPITALIZING AND ITALICIZING HER MOST POINTLESS RANTS, as some extremely annoying people do with their email. This is something of a godsend for the reader - we quickly learn to skim rather than read word for word anything that appears in emphatic typeface. Thanks for the warning - it did save some time slogging through this miserable mess. At one point, words apparently fail the author entirely, so she repeats the same word thirty or forty times to create an entire paragraph, hoping for some "literary effect." But words, after all, are what writing is about. They are not supposed to fail so miserably.

We learn that Kathryn likes to swear - a lot. We learn that she has just broken up with a boyfriend (this one is "Matthew") who, from her description, was devoted, loving and doting. For his efforts, she leaves him, for reasons she never articulates; then decides to string him along while she does a bit of bed hopping (with an unnumbered cast that remains anonymous). In the midst of her "wine trip to end all wine trips," she tells the fellow she'd like to start over again. When he advises that he is no longer enamored of her, we get to share her pity party. Matthew is a fellow who dodged a bullet if there ever was one.

Finally, we learn, after enduring page after page of shameless, ceaseless nattering and yammering, that Kathryn's father does have a real and compelling story to tell. About his life in occupied France; about his life as a struggling refugee in Canada; and about his frightening arrest, and release some months later, for a crime he did not commit. These revelations (which I can only assume are true) are the only portions of the book that truly command our attention and that plumb any emotional depths beyond those we can see every day - if we are so inclined -- on cable reruns of Jerry Springer or one of those squirm-inducing MTV reality shows.

I'm not so inclined.

If the book had been about Kathryn's dad, it might have been a worthwhile read. As it is, the book is an abject failure that leaves but one question - how and why was this pointless, shallow and abhorrent mess published? Here's a thought - perhaps this is supposed to be cynically positioned for a pitch to Hollywood as the next "Sideways" - a buddy/road movie with a wine angle. A blog that makes the blogger an overnight millionaire. Good grief, I hope not, but as Mencken would have it, "no one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public."

A corked wine is a wine that has gone bad - it is rancid, vinegary, and undrinkable; a bad wine and one that should either be thrown out (if found at home), or sent back for a replacement ( if in a restaurant or wine shop). After finishing this book, I thought that this was a remarkably good choice for the title of this book. This book is corked - it should not have been published, and is really rancid and bad. I suggest you not buy it or read it.

The main storyline is of a father/daughter trip to get to know each other now that the daughter is a 26 year old adult who has recently become aware of mortality and how quickly people can die. She realizes that she really does not know her father too well and wants to get to know him better while she still has the opportunity. The father was a hotel manager with a well developed taste for wines - something that the daughter, decidedly, did NOT inherit. While the father can hold knowledgeable discourses about wines at length, to her, they simply taste like wines. So, her idea is to spend two weeks with her father driving around France, going to a whole lot of wine tastings, as a way to learn more about her father through his knowledge and interest.

Seems like a reasonable idea, but this pairing was hardly made in heaven. As I read the book I could not imagine spending days with either of these two people, let alone two whole weeks with them in a car, hotel rooms, or restaurants. These are two of the most selfish, ego-centric, rude and crude people I have ever read about! I found almost nothing to like about them, and certainly could not care less if they found the connection the daughter was looking for or not, while reading the book, or after having finished it. For a two weeks tour that is supposed to get them closer together, instead we read of occasional anecdotes that the father tells that do very little to reach his daughter. He certainly does not go out of his way to show any kind of love or even affection to his daughter - instead he constantly complains about his bad knee as a way of getting out of walking or doing anything he does not want to do; he acts like a spoiled brat of a baby; and demeans and hollers at servers and staff at the hotels and restaurants that they visit. No wonder that the pair is thrown out of at least one restaurant in a small village.

The daughter is probably even worse. She spends most of the trip recounting her two boyfriends and multiple lovers - even telling her father about her own sex life (the three tenors?); she is in a constant bad mood and the screaming and hollering and things that get thrown at each other only made me shake my head in wonder. I know that I never had the urge to talk like that to my own father, and certainly, my two kids, would not dare - nor have the need to - talk like that to me! She is neurotic, gross, uncouth, depressed, and not fit to have a conversation with, let alone a two week trip.

There is not a chapter - no, strike that - two pages! - before swear words are thrown around at each other, the wineries, or many of the people that inhabit these pages. For a book that is intended to show how two people got together a little better it was an unbelievable performance and an extremely bad one to boot. This is a crude writer who knows nothing better than to spout swear words in the hopes that the shock value of seeing them in print will convey some sort of message. Although the only message that came across to me is of how unpleasant both of these people are and how little I want to know about them - and I would certainly never want to meet them in person.

Save your money and spend it on a different book. This is not a book that you would want to read if you want to learn about wines, wine trips, France, wine-growing regions in France, or father - daughter relationships. This book should go straight to the garbage heap that it came from.

I thought this book was kind of a mess.

The author starts out with a vivid scene in which she appears to be simultaneously disgusted by and thoroughly afraid of her father. This scene takes place several days into the trip, so then we have to backtrack and see how we got there. When we get to the point in the narrative where the scene actually takes place, the behavior does not seem consistent with the dad we have come to know at that point.

Kathryn and her father are probably two of the most unpleasant travel companions anyone could imagine, what with all the spitting and vomiting - way more detail than a normal person wants. Kathryn has hit and killed a pedestrian with her car, and has the nerve to point out that it's easier for her victim because he's dead and doesn't have to live with the horrible memory. Oh, yes, and she has just broken up with her boy friend but obsessively checks her voice mail hoping he has left her a message telling her he can't live without her. Honestly, the line when he told her he was no longer in love with her was the most satisfying moment in the book. I don't usually reveal plot points in my reviews, but I was so annoyed with the author most of the time - readers need to know that from the author's perspective, it is all about her. The author attempts to depict herself as a saint for taking this trip with her father, and also a victim - truthfully, I felt sorry for him much of the time. Every human being, much less one's own father, deserves more respect.

The relationship between Kathryn and her dad is overlaid with this self-conscious wackiness. They have inside jokes. I guess that is supposed to mean they love each other. That part doesn't work for me either.

If this were a novel I would probably not have so hard of a time with it. As a memoir, the author's frame of reference is too narrow and too alienating to enable me to care about her. Yes, there is some interesting information about wine. (Every time the author remembers some snippet from those long-ago lessons in her dad's basement and blurts it out at the appropriate time, we are supposed to cheer for her, which kind of ruins the fun.)

The blurb on the back cover calls this book hilarious. Maybe some people see it that way. I think it is kind of sad. Both the author and her dad have been through hard times. I wish I could be more sympathetic but I do not want to spend any more time with either one of them.

Sometimes someone writes a book which is horribly self-indulgent, and out of all that wallowing in their own "stuff", they manage to create something readable and interesting, something that illuminates some larger principle or idea or just tells a rollicking good tale.

This book is about as self-indulgent as they come, and horrible to the point of being unreadable. Consider the most annoying person you have ever met, badly behaved, and self-righteous. Now imagine that in addition to those features, this person has an absurd disregard for facts. And now imagine that you are forced to live inside that person's head while they give you a running commentary of their bad behavior, banal thoughts, and idiotic notions. Finally, imagine that it's all horribly badly written.

That's what this book is, and it's bad. Really really bad. I found no redeeming features other than the fact that it ended. Eventually.

I promised myself when I agreed to be part of the Vine program that I would read every word of every book they sent me. This book almost made me resign from the program so I didn't have to do that.

Give this one a pass. It's not worth any time you might spend reading it.

As another reviewer has mentioned - a wine that is "corked" is one that is spoiled, more vinegar than anything else because of a fungus that infects cork. Well, the memoir was honest but quite crude. Ms. Borel and her restaurateur father embark on a journey around France to taste wine and have some precious bonding time. But it's a bit hard to read about her father who in one word could be summed up as a jerk, and her a self-absorbed woman with penchant for cursing. Their conversations were annoying most of the time. And although it is not uncommon nowadays to air one's dirty laundry, the book paints quite an unflattering image of both father and daughter. Ms. Borel really made me feel like I was in that little car with them around the French countryside - but I wanted to get out.

I wholeheartedly agree with the other reviews thus far...not only is this not about travel or even about wine (other than brief anecdotes at the various wineries they visit), it's a painful, laborious "memoir" to get through. From the very beginning of this book, you are hit over the head with the fact that the young author (who doesn't reveal her age, 26, until almost the end of the book) and her father are extraordinarily childish, selfish, and obnoxious brats prone to profanity-laden tirades and tantrums. You wonder almost immediately why they would bother to take such a trip together, but you wonder even faster why you have to suffer through it as well.

Sadly for those of us in the Vine program, we are more or less obligated to read it from beginning to end so that we can give a proper review. But if you are not obliged yourself, pass this one by and prevent needless suffering! Had I picked this up in a bookstore or library and perused the first chapter or two, I would have put it down and walked away.

Aside from their obvious character flaws, both Kathryn and Philippe are, in a word, disgusting. She picks at and inspects the contents of her belly button, and he saves used Q-tips in his travel bag for further use. Do these tidbits really have a place in a memoir? They're gross and not things the average reader wants to know. The marketing blather on the back of the advance reader's copy has the audacity to say that this book will appeal to readers of Julie Powell and Peter Mayle, but Peter Mayle has more class in his index finger than Kathryn has on her belly button lint-capped finger.

I suppose I should give kudos to Kathryn for bravely displaying her faults without fear, but it seems more exhibitionistic than honest. When she describes the horrible accident in which she killed an elderly man who was jaywalking, her focus is entirely on HER with little acknowledgment of the tragedy that befell this man and HIS family. She deals with depression for quite some time afterward, and perhaps it affects her ability to behave like an adult, but she also seems to have enjoyed being known as a killer when back at college. She makes light of the accident far too often, and thinks her father's joke about the accident is hilarious when it is truly tasteless and despicable.

To further illustrate her immaturity and selfishness, she tells us about how she broke up with her boyfriend Matthew, who adored her and doted on her, and how she became promiscuous before their own bedsheets had even cooled down. (At least three men, but she lost count.)

Kathryn and her father are not people I would EVER want to know in person, and I certainly wouldn't want to read her innermost thoughts and go along with them on a two-week journey where they continue to act like, well, assholes. I cannot imagine how this book got past a literary agent and is scheduled to be published, but hopefully the publisher will see the reviews here and save themselves the money and some trees by not actually publishing this crap.

Toward the end, it does become a bit more engaging and more real, but I wouldn't have gotten that far if I didn't have to review it. She does have a knack for the metaphors, but again, they're not often appropriate (as when she vividly describes the old man's bones cracking as they hit her car). If Kathryn were not writing about herself, she could be a good writer, because of her descriptive prose, but let's hope she had only one autobiographical book in her.

As a wine fan who likes to travel I had high hopes for this book ... Hopes dashed very early on. This story is both tedious and poorly written and I found myself wondering more often how this author found a publisher instead of what happens next. (Oh and, why she's not in jail since she begins the story with her description of committing vehicular manslaughter and how traumatic it is for HER, the one who walks away without scratch under circumstances-even as she describes them herself-- that just scream: "she must have been drunk!" Even though she, of course, insists she was not.)

Most senior citizen bus tours of France focus more on wine and travel than this tale and if this wasn't a memoir, and therefore a supposedly true tale, I would have been wishing a disaster on the unlikable (actually detestable) main character.

This book isn't about wine, or travel or even daughter-father bonding. It's simply a self-indulgent story with a complete lack of introspection and basic interest that should have been saved for a blog entry, at best. And, even then, you should skip it.

This is a memoir by Kathryn Borel and in it she relates how she and her father embark on a wine trip across France and she attempts to face some of her demons. I say attempts, because she does not seem to succeed.

There are quite a few problems with this book. First, the book read like an SAT words overloaded essay. The author has quite the penchant for the literary mechanisms and she fails to implement them well. The analogies are over the top and out of place. The book could have enjoyed better editing to refine her style of writing. The overuse of analogies, metaphors, similes and hyperboles become one of this memoir's downfall. Frankly, it was over the top. She should have toned it down a bit, especially the overused adjectives for she "made a sauce with assiduous attention," and then "Dense fatigue cloaked my face like a goose-down comforter." Now imagine the entire book like the aforementioned sentences.

Second, the characters are unlikable. Although I appreciate the honesty, Ms. Borel's personality comes through quite clearly through the narrative and I did not find her likable. She came across as a selfish, egotistical, megalomaniac, needy, intolerant, desperate child with daddy issues. She also exhibited prepotency and a lousy character. Frankly, by the end of the book I was desperate for it to end, for I did not care one bit what happened in the book, nor to its characters. And that is the biggest downfall of the book.

By definition, "the term 'corked wine' is applied to all wines with TCA contamination because corks are the source of most of the problems. Even a very tiny amount of TCA in a wine can ruin it. When TCA is present in quantities high enough to be evident to a person, it comes across as 'musty' aromas and flavors. If you get a 'corked' wine, you should return it to the store from which it was purchased or refuse it at the restaurant." (Definition taken from [...])

This book is about a daughter (Kathryn) who suffers from depression after a tragic accident and is plagued by the thought of her father's death. In order to get to know her father better before he dies, she suggests they embark on a wine tasting trip through France.

The book, for me, was a very difficult read. I felt as though Kathryn were trying too hard with big words and a great deal of metaphors which often made no sense to me. I found myself thinking "get to the point" on numerous occasions. I wanted to stop reading the book after only a few pages, but continued to read it for two reasons: a) I was hoping there was be a big turn and it would get interesting. So, I wanted to see what would happen- would her father die? and b) I thought I would not have been able to give you an accurate review had I not read it all.

For me, the book did not become interesting until page 250- then I began to smile. Kathryn and her dad have a sort of "aha" moment and their wine trip (which is almost at the end) becomes enjoyable for both the reader and the father-daughter duo. Otherwise, the book was painfully long, filled with Kathryn letting us inside of her thoughts, where she goes off on nonsensical rants often. Torturing us with stories of her ex-boyfriends, their break-ups and the like.

Her father, though, was extremely likable and I enjoyed reading the stories of his past that he would share with Kathryn from time-to-time. I also enjoyed reading about his angry fits that he would have with certain people they meet. As a woman who has a highly complex, on again-off again, love/dislike/happy/sad relationship with her own father, I completely "get" Kathryn's dad as he is presented in the book. I get her embarrassment with him at times, but still love him. He is who he is and at the very end of the book, Kathryn learns why.

We learn the names of many towns in France as well as types of grapes. We meet very interesting keepers at the wineries they visit and go on at-times boring tours through the imagery Kathryn uses.

Something that I did find very annoying was the fact that though there is a great deal of French language used in the book, only some of the language is translated for the reader. I, myself, studied French for seven years and I am slightly familiar with the language, having lost it along the way. I felt bothered, though, for the reader who knows no French and therefore a piece of the storyline is lost for them because they do not know what is being said.

Having said all of this, I am no better for having read this book and it was a completely torturous read and waste of my time. You, though, may feel differently about it.

While reading Corked, I was reminded of the trip I took with my mother to Australia in 1988. We travelled throughout the whole country in a car just like the author did with her father in France. The book was more about her father. He was obnoxious, rude and had a temper. I did not like him from the beginning, but Kathryn had a way to control him. I have always liked biographies but it took me a while to get into the story. I found the story sad and I would never like to spend any time with her father. There are more interesting books out there.If I did not have to review it, I would have not finished the book. In regard to my trip to Australia, we had a fantastic time.
(review by Eileen, Melissa's Mother)