The Fly-Truffler: A Novel [Paperback]

Gustaf Sobin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2001

Out of the pungent soil and wind-struck orchards of Provence, this enchanting love story will make you believe, if you ever doubted it, in the power of love and the lengths people will go to keep it alive.

Philippe Cabassac has fly-truffled—the art of stalking the flies that lay their eggs directly over the truffles—every winter since childhood on his family estate in Provence. Since the death of his young wife, Julieta, the truffles have come to represent something far more than a delicacy for Cabassac's palate: they trigger an evocative sequence of dream visions in which he and his lost wife enter, on winter nights, a state of intimate and prolonged communion. As Cabassac becomes increasingly involved in his dream life with Julieta, he loses his hold on his teaching obligations, on managing his estate, on his waking life altogether. Set against the fading of traditional Provencal culture and an incandescent Mediterranean landscape, The Fly- Truffler celebrates a love that, by its very ardor, outlasts a lifetime. Reading group guide included.

Editorial Reviews

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 --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (April 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393321797
• ISBN-13: 978-0393321791
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #958,231 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Delectable, March 8, 2000

By 

mrpennysworth "mrpennysworth" - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Fly-Truffler: A Novel (Hardcover)

On December 31, 1999 my wife and I had a deliciously indulgent millennial dinner at March. The first course was a "beggar's purse" filled with truffles and topped with an edible shaving of 24-carat gold. (OK, so it was over-the-top indulgent.) This book by Gustaf Sobin reminded me of that first course: small, sensuous, exquisitely crafted, poetically expressive, unlike anything I had experienced before and celebratory of passages, of memory and moving on. "The Fly-Truffler" is Philippe Cabassac's elegy to his wife, Julieta, their intimate romance and her tragic death. But, most of all, it is an elegy to the passing of local languages and customs, to the loss of the simple country life. The poetic heart of the book is Philippe's recognition that Julieta is the embodiment of Haut Provence followed by the erotically charged consummation of their love by a waterfall, a memory ultimately restored through truffles. When you are finished with this appetizer, I would recommend "The Rings of Saturn" by W.G. Sebald as a second course of what is slowly becoming a literary feast of moving millennial contemplations.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Poetic and sensual, April 5, 2000

By 

Susannah Indigo - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Fly-Truffler: A Novel (Hardcover)

A perfect moment of storytelling -- to be read in one sitting, thus inducing a dreamlike sense of place, love, loss and inspiration.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A book for language lovers, June 7, 2001

By 

M. J. Smith (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Fly-Truffler: A Novel (Paperback)

This novel is written in four chapters - the second chapter, the story of a philology professor's romance with a student only justifies the cost of the book. Sobin's understanding of language - words as objects to be enjoyed, the importance of silence, of absent words - is remarkable. (You may note some similarities to Edmond Jabes.)

Sobin's understanding of a person's rootedness in place and the effects of loss of place is another thread expression through the professor's estate of many generations, his cousin's emigration and his wife's orphanhood.

At one point, the plot of the novel fails, becoming contrived but the grace and depth of the prose makes a reader ready to forgive the slip.

An enjoyable novel with depth.