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All Over Again, a foodie travelogue by Sergei Parkhomenko (NF)
Rights sold: Russia - CORPUS
It took me as many as thirteen years to write the fifty-six sketches that make up this book. I first wrote something in this peculiar genre in 2004 and the latest of these texts came along in 2017.
I have always felt that gastronomy was a very important and in a sense fundamental branch of human knowledge. And not just because the gastronomic experiences, as someone aptly phrased it, are a unique conglomerate of sensations supplied by all five human senses – taste, smell, sight, hearing, and touch – and in this regard only sex can fully compete with them. Another source of its importance is that gastronomy quite naturally turns out to be a literally undrainable source of incredibly fascinating snippets from people’s lives.
The workings of all five senses leave five distinct imprints in your memory. Coming together and superimposing, they are the only thing capable of creating a truly vivid, three-dimensional picture of a minute that flew by once upon a time and maybe even of a full day that was once lived.
It turns out that I am not writing gastronomical sketches; rather I am infinitely adapting and readapting the story about the evanescence of all that exists, the story that unfolds again and again, in different circumstances and various shapes.
Oddly enough, every such experience turned out to be firmly tied not only to a specific year, a point on the time axis, but also to another point – on the geographical map.
I know it may sound absurd, flippant, even grotesque, but hear me out: a thing meant to be put on a plate and eventually end up in a stomach, turns out to be a universal fabric tying together time and space.
Original language: Russian. Around 350.000 words.
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The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito and His Disciples, a novel by Ilya Ehrenburg (1922)
Publishers: Estonia - VARRAK (2004), Finland - TAJO (1964), France - PLON (1964), Germany - KINDLER (1967), SUHRKAMP (1976, 1990), Italy - EINAUDI (1969), MERIDIANO ZERO (2012), Spain - SEIX BARRAL (1971), AKAL (1997), CAPITÁN SWING LIBROS, Switzerland - GLOOR (1970), Turkey - ADAM (1983, 1994), USA/UK - MACQIBBON & KEE (1958), GREENWOOD PRESS (1976)
The book deals with the adventures of a Mexican dreamer Julio Jurenito and his wanderings about Europe along with his seven disciples (Ehrenburg himself is the first disciple and the author-narrator).
The novel includes authentic characters, such as Mayakovski, Picasso, Chaplin, and Tatlin. This is a biting satire of the European postwar civilization. This extraordinarily sneering book is a modernized Candide, covering Soviet Russia and the European West, after the stress of the WWI years.
Its main character Jurenito (he is supposed to be a portrait of the famous Mexican painter, Diego Rivera) and his Negro servant travel, observe, comment, and make the reader roar with laughter at the idiotic inconsistencies of capitalist civilization. A prolific and smart journalist by nature, Ehrenburg combines a satirical vein with a snappy, terse language, and a flair for topical themes with very unsentimental eroticism.
Julio Jurenito will probably remain the most vivid illustration, not just in Russian but in the whole of European literature, of the post-WWI sentiments of the harassed western intelligentsia. In this book there is everything: sophistication, cynicism, trenchant satire, sentimental lyricism, and the gay abandon of despair. All this combined makes a brilliant firework of paradoxes, subtle observations of the life of the European bourgeoisie, and sarcastic details. It may be called a confession, a pamphlet, a grotesque, or a poem.…A piquant, picaresque satire a la Voltaire of both Western capitalism and the Communist Revolution. - TIME
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A mixture of mockery and prophecy, the book savaged every ideology and religion while foreseeing both the Holocaust and Hiroshima. (Ehrenburg himself predicted the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union to the day -- his intimacy with history always bordered on the telepathic.) - Richard Lourie, The NY Times, August 25, 1996