Everybody will have to learn to defend themselves from Max's all-powerful grandmother.Īlina Bronsky writes of family dysfunction and machinations with a droll and biting humor, a tremendous ear for dialog, and a generous heart that is forgiving of human weakness. When a child is born to Nina that is the spitting image of Max's grandfather, things come to a hilarious if dramatic head. While he may be a dolt in his grandmother's eyes, Max is bright enough to notice that his stoic and taciturn grandfather has fallen hopelessly in love with their neighbor, Nina. His grandmother has been telling Max that he is an incompetent, clueless weakling since he was a child and she'd spend the day sitting in the back of his classroom to be sure he came to no harm. But she is not at all pleased with how things are run in Germany: the doctors and teachers are incompetent, the food is toxic, and the Germans are generally untrustworthy. When his grandmother-a terrifying, stubborn matriarch and a former Russian primadonna-moved them from the Motherland it was in search of a better life. Max lives with his grandparents in a residential home for refugees in Germany.
In her new novel, Russian-born Alina Bronsky gives readers a moving portrait of the devious limits of the will to survive.From the acclaimed author of The Hottest Dishes Of The Tartar Cuisine "a cruel comic romp ends as a surprisingly winning story of hardship and resilience" ( The New Yorker). Told with sly humor and an anthropologist's eye for detail, The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine is the story of three unforgettable women whose destinies are tangled up in a family dynamic that is at turns hilarious and tragic. But as soon as they are settled in the West, the uproariously dysfunctional ties that bind mother, daughter and grandmother begin to fray. When Aminat, now a wild and willful teenager, catches the eye of a sleazy German cookbook writer researching Tartar cuisine, Rosa is quick to broker a deal that will guarantee all three women a passage out of the Soviet Union. While her good for nothing husband Kalganow spends his days feeding pigeons and contemplating death at the city park, Rosa wages an epic struggle to wrestle Aminat away from Sulfia, whom she considers a woefully inept mother. Much to Rosa's surprise and delight, dark eyed Aminat is a Tartar through and through and instantly becomes the apple of her grandmother's eye.
But despite her best efforts, the baby, Aminat, is born nine months later at Soviet Birthing Center Number 134. When she discovers that her seventeen-year-old daughter, "stupid Sulfia," is pregnant by an unknown man she does everything to thwart the pregnancy, employing a variety of folkloric home remedies. Rosa Achmetowna is the outrageously nasty and wily narrator of this rollicking family saga from the author of Broken Glass Park.
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