Review: Keeping the Feast

Title:  Keeping the Feast

Author:  Paula Butturini

To be published by Riverhead Books in February 2010.

This review is based on an advanced reader's copy.  I received this book for free to review.

Summary:

Paula Butturini grew up in a very Italian family, where everyone came together at the end of the day to share a good meal and stories.  She held tight to this tradition through moves across the US and Europe, through a marriage and early divorce, through the shattering knowledge that her mother suffered from severe depression.

When Butturini met John Tagliabue- a reporter for the New York Times- in Rome, she was grateful to have finally found someone who seemed to truly understand her, someone with whom she could start her life.  They lived together reporting the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, and going through a great many troubles because of it.

Butturini was beaten and bruised by riot police only a few weeks before her wedding.  And only a short time after they were married, Tagliabue was shot and nearly killed by a bullet through his body.  While he recovered, slowly, from the bodily injuries, he was much slower to recover from the emotional toll.  Butturini soon realized that, just as her mother had, her husband too was suffering from severe and acute depression.  After yet another blow hits their family, Paula and John returned to Italy in an attempt to heal their scars, depending on their happy memories of meals and walks and blossoming love in Rome to get them through their trauma.

I was so excited to be offered this book to review because I thought it would be a bit like A Year in Provence- a fun story of expats dealing with culture shock and eating yummy food in a foreign country.  I was slightly worried about the more religious aspects of the book- Butturini is a former religion reporter, Tagliabue had a stint in a monastery, there is a quote from the Bible to start the book and a quote from a Christian reviewer on the back cover, and references to church in the prologue.  However, there was very little overtly religious in the book- not enough to lessen my enjoyment of the book at all.  And this book is nothing at all like A Year in Provence.

Butturini has written a deeply thoughtful memoir about the pains of dealing with a family member who suffers from depression.  She manages, somehow, to do this in a way that is not depressing for the reader.  No one close to me suffers from depression, and I don't think I have the patience or the depth of compassion that is necessary to handle such a situation.  Butturini does, but she never makes her mother or her husband seem objects of pity.  She shows so well how strong they are, how courageous to fight an attack that takes place within their own bodies and minds.  And she does it with such beautiful language.

Each chapter has a type of food as a title, and each begins with a scene or memory from Butturini's childhood involving that food.  She describes the people involved in the memory, the taste of the food, why the scene is so important to her.  And then she brings us back to the present reality, the difficulties she is facing, the immense dread she feels to face another day that might be so very much like the last.

And so it is not so much a travel memoir as a food memoir.  Italy plays a role in this memoir, but not as large a role as Italian food does.  As someone who truly enjoys a trip to the farmers' market and then cooking with those ingredients, I know how cathartic preparing a meal to share with family and friends can be.  Butturini describes in her book how food saved her from despair, how it allowed her to bond with her mother when her mother was untouchable, and how it brought her husband back to her, in some small form, for at least an hour every day.

I truly enjoyed reading this book, even though it was different than I expected.  It is not a fast-paced read, and it can be difficult sometimes to read about just how sad everyone in the story is.  I think Butturini did a wonderful job of showing depression and its affects on a family in a compassionate and thoughtful light.  She writes with such emotion.  If you want a slower, more introspective read, this is a good one for that sort of mood.

One annoyance:  Butturini describes so many mouth-watering dishes, but does not share even one recipe in this book!  I would have greatly enjoyed a recipe for at least one risotto!

Thanks to TLC Book Tours for inviting me to participate in this tour.