Amazon.com Review
Each winter Philippe Cabassac taps through the undergrowth on his estate, murmuring entreaties to
lei mousco, or flies. Drawn by the rich scent of truffles, flies lay their eggs in the loose topsoil, and Cabassac uses their presence to dig for the mysterious delicacy he calls "far more carnal, fleshy, gamelike than anything vegetal." And in this case, these black truffles have a strange additional power, one that gives Cabassac's hunt a special urgency: eating them brings on dreams of his dead wife, Julieta.
Approaching 50, the hero of The Fly-Truffler is a solidly built linguistics professor whose pet subject is the dying Provençal dialect. He lives in a dilapidated farmhouse, the family home for eight generations, selling off a parcel of land each year in order to make ends meet. Every sale is a kind of small betrayal, for Cabassac's roots in the Provençal landscape run deep. Like his ancestors, he goes "truffling every winter, gathering wild asparagus in the spring, flowering medicinal herbs each summer, and a plethora of pale, speckled mushrooms each fall." He belongs there as utterly as his young wife belonged nowhere.
Julieta was the most enigmatic of Cabassac's students. A tall, aquiline-nosed orphan, she grasped at the Provençal dialect as if by doing so she could forge herself an identity and a history. Their marriage was brief yet, for Cabassac, idyllic. Now, in eating the rich flesh of truffles, he seems to exchange "one buried thing for another." Desperate to prolong his nighttime contact with Julieta, he soon neglects teaching, his estate, and indeed all the obligations of his waking life--except for hunting the keys to the underworld where his wife dwells. As pungent and rich as one of Cabassac's truffle omelets, poet Gustaf Sobin's novel is a lyrical meditation on loss, love, and memory, as well as a vivid portrait of Provençal life. --Lisa Gee
From Publishers Weekly
Sobin--a poet, novelist (Venus Blue) and longtime resident of Provence--breathlessly evokes the dying language and haunting beauty of that bucolic French province in his shimmering novel. Philippe Cabassac, a dedicated Provencal and professor of the nearly extinct language, is the gloomy middle-aged protagonist of this tale of obsessive desire. He fly-truffles every winter, hunting the wooded hills of his ancestral farmland for truffles by marking the location where the flies, those "golden keys," lay their eggs. Grieving over the untimely death two years before of his beloved wife, Julieta (she was a young student in his class), Cabassac has made the gradual and thrilling discovery that the ingestion of truffles creates a state of receptivity to nightly visitations by her. With each successive, sensuous dream, Cabassac comes closer to discovering the secret Julieta needs to impart. Obsessed with unearthing that odoriferous tuber, "the agent of epiphanous visions," Cabassac invites his dreams to consume his real life and he all but signs away his patrimony--his land and the ramshackle farmhouse where he grew up and only he and his aged aunt are left to inhabit. Sobin's prose is dense and aromatic, his descriptions gorgeously verging on the purple. Through flashbacks, Cabassac recalls the meeting and courtship of the strangely passive object of desire, Julieta, whose "amorphous immensities" the linguistics professor longs to fill "with every articulated cell of his being." Through a series of dazzling associations, she comes to embody the spirit of the land Cabassac adores: the "wild, resinous stands of pinewood," "salted meats hanging from rafters," "chaff flying like sparks in a high wind" and on and on. Sobin is deeply in his element, borrowing gothic strains from Edgar Allan Poe, and the more carried away he becomes, the more deliriously rich the reader's feast. (Jan.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
