Aftertaste

Anthony Bourdain meets Marcel Proust – via The Kamogawa Food Detectives – in this high-energy, often anarchic debut from Ukrainian-American Dana Lavelle.

In the heart of Brighton Beach’s Russian enclave, 10-year-old Kostya, mourning the recent death of his father, starts experiencing mysterious hallucinations – not visions, or sounds, but tastes. Aftertastes. Naturally, everyone – including Kostya – assumes he’s going crazy. But he’s not. On the contrary, it turns out that this remarkable ability is being visited on him by the spirits of the dead. What’s more, in the right circumstances, recreating the foods he’s tasting brings those spirits into the corporeal world. And if that wasn’t enough – if Kostya’s life wasn’t already sufficiently complicated – about a third of the way through this story, there’s a neat twist that introduces a truly epic love story, too.

There’s a lot going on here, but Lavelle attacks it all with humour and passion and is at her best when she’s writing about food. She not only has an impressive ability to vividly evoke flavours – not easy to do – she also brings terrific imagination to the ways in which flavours might mirror or embody emotion. You can tell she’s put an exceptional palate to good use (she mentions checking restaurants off her bucket list as a favourite pastime). If this novel-writing business doesn’t work out for her, she’s a shoo-in as a restaurant critic.

As Proust (and Bourdain) knew, food is also a way to address larger metaphysical questions, and that’s a big part of what Lavelle is doing here. If you could have one last moment with a dead loved one, would you? What price would you pay? What does “closure” even mean? And if Lavelle occasionally veers into (ahem) cheesy or (cough) overripe territory, her enormous brio sweeps us along regardless. It’s a rich mix, and often a delicious one.