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40 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointing, June 14, 2008
Kim Sunee can write well enough, and the premise of this book is intriguing. But over the course of the pages, I grew to find her less appealing, and found the book increasingly less engaging as the story seems to become repetitive and lose focus.
I think that primary allure of this book for the publisher was that the main character has a relationship with the Olivier Baussan, the founder of L'Occitaine. (If he'd been just a regular French businessman, I doubt this book would have received write ups in the New York Times.) He meets Kim, falls in love and brings her to Provence. There, she lives an enviable life that is the stuff of Peter Mayle books. They purchase an apartment in Paris and they take trips all over the world. For Kim, the sensitive poet, he even opens up a bookstore dedicated to poetry for her on the Ille St. Louis. But it isn't enough for Kim. In her 20s, she feels smothered by the domestic nature of her life and relationship with her older lover, who is portrayed as a controlling, if well meaning, mentor. Fair enough. I could sympathize that her life may have taken on the frame of a gilded cage.
Where this story becomes troubled is about one third of the way through, when the author moves away from Olivier to live in Paris on her own. For one, she's been a stepmother to his young daughter and she just walks out on her. From the book, it appears she never even sees the little girl again. I found this a surprisingly callous move from someone whose own issues come from being abandoned by her mother in Korea at age three. Olivier calls pleading for her return. Clearly, they continue to have a connection and Kim seems to enjoy his calls, but instead she dates a series of men. But then, she is enraged when she finds he takes on a lover. So she's agnostic about her relationship with Olivier until she can't have him -- then feels rejected when he's already moved on.
But even so, around this point, she lost me. To be fair, the above is an old story of flawed human emotion that some of us have experienced, and more likely when we're immature and in our 20s. But it doesn't make good or compelling reading in this case. In this long section of the book, I felt like I was reading a cleaned up version of her diary or journal, and kept wondering why her editor didn't pare parts of this down.
I expected this story to end with some kind of resolution, but there really isn't any. After some 300 pages, I was left with the feeling that there was no discovery of what home truly meant, nor any breakthrough in self awareness on the author's part. As a result, there was no such conclusion for me as a reader.
I left the book feeling that Kim is probably a nice person, even though this book makes her sound a bit self absorbed and even a touch shallow. Perhaps she needed more time away from this period in her life to have a more insightful take on it, and to offer more reflective takeaways from other adoptees who also have issues with the concept of "home."
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27 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Overwrought recipes, boring existential crisis, July 6, 2008
OK, here's the deal. I get the quarterlife existential crisis, I do. But when you're suffering said crisis in Provence at your sugar daddy's villa, and you have no job, no responsibilities and no sense of humor--and then you write a mopey 350-page book about it--that crisis becomes unrelatable and obnoxious.
While she's sunning naked on Corsica, she feels isolated and unloved. OK, that's legit, but her vague misery, as conveyed through Sunee's admittedly excellent writing, means that I don't even get to enjoy Corsica by extension!
The sights and smells and tastes of Provence sound wonderful, but the extended descriptions of cunnilingus by her old, rich French boyfriendm and her interpersonal relationships in general are just tiresome, exhausting and as unfulfilling for the reader as they are for Sunee. As a rule, none of the humans in this memoir are drawn half as well as the dishes. You don't get a real sense of what the people look like, where they came from or what contributes to their various flavors.
I found myself sympathizing with the mother she finds so critical and cold. The mother obviously is trying but failing to convey the absence of substance and maturity in her daughter's life, but Sunee is so angry (she claims her sister is the angry one, but it's obviously her), that she ignores the warning entirely.
For that matter, I couldn't figure out for the life of me what she saw in any of her boyfriends other than privilege and heavy-handed, controlling gift-giving and empty promises of salvation. She was young. I get that, too. Almost all young women have made the same mistaken emotional investments, but she doesn't seem to learn anything, she doesn't have any wisdom to convey after having survived the suffocation of the bell jar, she isn't more interesting or wiser after it all, she just speaks French fluently and is passably continental.
Basically, this book is too long, the author is too self-serious, and the life lived is too self-indulgent and spoiled to be genuinely interesting to anyone but the writer and her immediate family.
I was expecting M.F.K. Fisher, Betty McDonald or Mildred Armstrong Kalish, but this woman, articulate though she may be, doesn't come close to achieving their level of perception, wisdom or general literary appeal. I don't recommend this one. Sorry.
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26 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Tasty reading, February 13, 2008
It's not unusual for young, attractive, intelligent, and talented young women to enter relationships with older, successful, rich men. If the women are ambitious enough, they often get tired of the strictures in such relationships and leave to pursue self-directed lives. Kim Sunee's book is a variant on this kind of story with a number of added twists. An orphan abandoned in Korea at a young age, Kim was adopted by an American family and grew up in New Orleans. She cared about her parents and other family members but seemed destined to leave early and pursue an independent life. Her subsequent experiences in Europe make interesting reading, especially as her culinary expertise undergoes a transition from Cajun to Continental cuisine and recipes for various dishes are given at the end of each chapter. This is a book as much about love of eating as it is about love of men. Most of the book is devoted to her relationship of several years with an older, rich French businessman and their indulgent lifestyle, with homes in Paris and Provence. He has various plans for her life with him including purchase of a bookstore for poetry books, but eventually this confinement proves too much and a painful separation ensues.
Kim searches unsuccessfully for her past, her origin in Korea, and this theme appears repeatedly as her lack of firm identity continues and she tries to come to grips with never finding her natural parents. Her fruitless trip to Korea is a painful reminder. I found myself trying to imagine growing up with the pain of being an orphan, yet at the same time somewhat deplored her perhaps undeserved indulgent lifestyle in France. I did enjoy the details of her Provencal life - the foods, the people, the towns and weather - reminding me of my own time spent there with my wife and parents. I liked her ability to add French conversational words and phrases, smoothly followed in most cases by easy English translations.
Kim is still a work in progress and another reviewer makes a good point in describing this book as perhaps somewhat premature. Kim may be finding her own voice, yet hers is still an engaging story worth reading. She has plenty of potential and I look forward to her future writings.
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