Aimee Bender’s stories are skewed a few degrees from normal. Her characters move through a magically spiced reality; their lives are shaped by a different set of rules.
Take Rose Edelstein, the central character in “The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake.” Shortly before her ninth birthday, Rose develops the ability to taste in her food the emotions of those who’ve prepared it.
Bender’s breakout book seems to fit into what she described as a “kind of food time, in terms of (pop) culture.”
But the book is only partially about food, Bender said on a recent visit to Denver. “It’s about family. Food is really an entry point. And it’s often a stranger book than people expect it to be.”
The Edelstein family dynamics are complex, but Rose’s ability to taste what is beneath the surface provides insight into both she and the reader. Most troubling is her sphinx-like older brother Joseph, whom Bender describes as “the central mysterious character.” Over the course of the novel, he becomes increasingly withdrawn — not because he is insensitive, but because, Bender said, “he is so easily bombarded by the world.
“I think of (Rose and Joseph) as being porous in different degrees. She’s porous when she eats; she takes in too much. There are moments between him and his mom, and him and his world, where he gets too overstimulated, and the only way to escape is to pull away.”
Bender’s narrative structure owes much to fairy tales. Of Italo Calvino, she said, “the reason he loved translating Italian folk tales was how quickly they move the plot. There is a kind of statement, then it moves forward, and it goes into the next paragraph and you just clip along.”
Her stories have more internal movement and description than a fairy tale would.
“But I like that pace, that sense that you can say something in a matter-of-fact way. You don’t have to explain it,” she said. “Motivation shows up in a different way than it does in a more realistic story, where you want the character to be motivated, like an actor is motivated in a scene, by want: ‘I want this person to love me so I’m going to act in a certain way.’
“In a fairy tale, the character’s internal life happens through the story line, the landscape, through the things that happen. If the character is troubled, at times the Earth will crack open. I like that, too. The internal life of the character can show up through the story in a different way.”
Bender also demonstrates an economy of language that is both straightforward and lyric. Rose discovers her unwelcome gift after taking a bit of birthday cake baked by her mother:
“Because the goodness of the ingredients — the fine chocolate, the freshest lemons — seemed like a cover over something larger and darker, and the taste of what was underneath was beginning to push up from the bite.
“I could absolutely taste the chocolate, but in drifts and traces, in an unfurling, or an opening, it seemed that my mouth was also filling with the taste of smallness, the sensation of shrinking, of upset, tasting a distance I somehow knew was connected with my mother, tasting a crowded sense of her thinking, a spiral, like I could almost even taste the grit in her jaw that had created the headache that meant that she had to take as many aspirins as were necessary, a white dotted line of them in an ellipsis to her comment: I’m going to lie down . . .”
Bender, who teaches at the University of Southern California, said that when teaching her class in magical realism, she writes the words “magic” and “logic” on the board.
“Magic relies upon the logic and the parameters of where it goes,” she said. So it is with Rose, whose life after her lemon-cake- moment is defined by what she has to taste.
She sees her story as a puzzle for the reader to put together. “I think fiction is often a progression of a certain kind of logic, which is a certain kind of mathematical thinking,” she said. “What’s exciting to me is you pair that logic with a strangeness, and the rules of logic start to push against something we don’t recognize.”
Robin Vidimos is a freelance writer living in Centennial.
FICTION
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
by Aimee Bender, $25.95
