2023-04-17 22:02:27
Mith this novel, Teresa Präauer can once again be attested to be something of a subversive model: if “Johnny und Jean” (2014) was an artist novel and at the same time its parody, “Oh Schimmi” (2016) was a portrait of an outsider and an anarchic monkey circus, “Cooking in the wrong century” a piece of pop literature and its satirical alienation; a decal of the Manufactum Servus world and its caricature; a conversation piece in which the speaker’s thoughts are at least as important as their words.
We are in a spacious apartment in a bourgeois district of a nameless city easily identifiable as Vienna. The staff also has no names: “For a few years, the hostess was with her partner, who in turn was with his smartphone.” The two have lived there for a while, but there are still banana crates lying around. They invited friends over for dinner because that’s what you do when you’re grown up. You’re over forty, so pretty much grown up. Expected are a married couple who are taking an evening off from their baby and “the Swiss”, a university teacher whose girlfriend is unable to attend.
The guests are unpunctual
Those who cook in the wrong century lack routine. The menu is not overly ambitious: lettuce with pear, pecan nuts, goat’s cream cheese and beetroot (“By the way, they didn’t say beetroot here, but beetroot”), quiche Lorraine and popsicles. But the guests are not punctual, their shoes leave stains on the light hallway floor, and the partner cleans up a mishap with the expensive tea towel from Copenhagen. “The hostess practiced being calm,” and on the next page: “The hostess stayed calm, that came from practicing so much.”
The story starts three times, with three different beginnings, each time the kaleidoscope rotates one step further, each time there is a small list of ingredients as an appetizer. The playlist goes perfectly with the respective micro-event: if “the Swiss” laments the lack of utopias, Miles Davis’ “So What” follows, “the husband” reports outraged about a dispute, Nina Simone sings “Don’t Explain”. An episodic novel? More of a lively, playful tale intertwined with a soliloquy full of sensual reminiscences: “In the beginning there was the artichoke.” – “Leaf by leaf you plucked from the large tuber” to the “delicious artichoke heart”, but that resists being eaten because the beginner didn’t remove the hay: “This sweet bitterness!”
The main ingredients: humor and irony
Teresa Präauer: “Cooking in the Wrong Century”.
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Image: Wallstein Verlag
Through Präauer’s peephole we look into a cozy home of today, in which the supposedly simple life is the good thing, a marketplace of old furniture and values with a sense of new design and moral refurbishment. In the inventory of culinary milestones, the gap between student life in the “substandard apartment” and the sympathetically snobby lifestyle existence is measured, in which the Alvar Aalto vase and the Iittala glass peacefully coexist with the flea market find. The author spices it up with wit and finely dosed irony, but unlike in the classic pop novel, there is no cynicism. No artichoke heart of darkness is sought, but the lost time of virgin taste sensations. The unashamedly nostalgic undertone also resonates in the everyday historical view of the generations of mothers and grandmothers who were poorer in many ways, but could and knew some things that the granddaughter only has as a sensual memory. The protagonists, who multiply their real presence almost in real time through advertising-effectively linked videos on the web, are still flesh and blood people, and the narrator is one of them, distinguished only by her awareness of the state of affairs – and of the associated language: “Why have people been so fond of saying lately everything’s ok? Why did they ask: Is everything okay? (. . .) Where actually very little was simply good, almost nothing at all.” Because she has read Bourdieu and the distinction between this and that German is particularly pronounced in gastronomic product information, the hostess also wonders why “this many subtle differences”, “even within a language”.
Perhaps they increase the enjoyment, just as Präauer’s well-planned rhythm and clever use of direct and indirect speech, of repetitions, variations and quotations increase the pleasure in the text, until a da capo al fine leads us into the endless loop of hospitable retreats. On the one hand, oral satisfaction when eating and drinking (Crémant!) and speaking prepares the ground for an erotic change of subject, since sex is “a form of conversation using other means”. On the other hand, the question of the good life is in no way restricted to hedonism. Whether it’s small talk or “deep talk”, “Cooking in the wrong century” also tells of a mid-life crisis: It’s not easy to unpack the banana crates if you don’t know what to think of your own rise and whether the freedom you have won is not is contradicted by the memory of the things and habits that are carried along. Leaf by leaf, like feasting on an artichoke, the narrator gets to the heart of the matter until a surprise guest from overseas reveals it to the hostess. The “sweet bitterness” is also the flavor note of this book.
Teresa Präauer: “Cooking in the Wrong Century”. Novel. Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2023. 198 pages, hardcover, €22.
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