Aimee Bender's "The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake"

With its gentle prose and fascinating characters, it is easy to love Aimee Bender’s “The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake”. For someone who has never been acquainted with the author’s seemingly surreal stories, the characters strike me as odd. Though they are admirable, one can’t help but ask “Did I just pick another super-heroes-with-super-powers themed book?”.

 A young girl, Rose Elderstein, is a prodigy of taste.  As she took a bite from a lemon cake baked by her mom during her 9^th birthday she did not only taste the cake’s citrus and buttery taste, she also tasted the contents of her mother’s heart. The cake, despite its blended taste of sugary sweetness and lemony sourness, was hollow. And that was how she knew the amount of loneliness her mother was going through. I enjoyed reading the book especially because it was this gifted young girl, Rose, who voiced the story. The prose was womanly: intricate, florid, sensitive and sweeping. It keeps ones senses (especially taste) in a clockwork. I actually remember eating twice as much as I read on, what with all the talk about food and taste.

As her narrative unfolds, the reader will discover that it wasn’t only Rose Elderstien who was gifted with a special streak. Her paternal grandfather who with a slight whiff of a person’s scent, can tell a lot about the person. She also has a brother, born a savant but later on deteriorates and becomes a piece of furniture (One needs to understand the nature of Aimee Bender’s stories to know why this is so). And if one does not limit his or her imagination or speculation to Rose’s narrative, one would assume that the father, too, has a gift (albeit he’s too scared to discover it’s boon or bane).

 Although the characters possess a superhuman ability, they do not go fighting for the sake of saving the world as we are all inclined to think with characters like these. The story was not of an earth-shaking kind but through the eyes of a young girl one will come to share her silent struggles, her gift, the wads of secrets she bore, secrets that came to her without her asking. Don't we, at some point in life, also hold secrets that by mere breath of it and its unknown outcomes just causes a shudder? Secrets with no trace of telling whether its a blessing or a curse? This is how I’ve come to appreciate the story, as always is the reason for admiring any book regardless of how far-fetched or irrelevant its characters and their circumstances are, there is always that tiny keyhole that one can peep into and find the slightest resemblance to one’s life. As Aimee Bender’s fiction progress, we are told about the mother’s palpable loneliness, that it was because of the almost-always-absent husband who’s too frightened to embrace his own weakness, the self-absorbed first-born and of course the many entanglements and complications a married life leads to. The other sibling reveals about how her mom has an affair to fill this void. But despite knowing this, Rose hid it as she did her “gift”. And she hid it well until she’s at that age when life’s mightiest of blows teaches us to accept the things that fate has bind us to. It is a thoughtful story that’s a blend of magic and realism.

I lifted some parts in the book which I liked

“I bit into the chocolate chip. Slowed myself down.

By then, almost a week in, I could sort through the assault of layers a little more quickly. The chocolate chips were from a factory, so they had the same slight metallic, absent taste to them, the butter had been pulled from cows in pens, so the richness was not as full. The eggs were tinged with a hint of faraway and plastic. All those parts hummed in the distance, and then the baker, who’d mixed the butter and formed the dough, was angry. A tight anger in the cookie itself.”

“He smiled at me, and it was genuine, but it was also a smile from further away. Our boats on the river have drifted apart. There was a loyalty call he’d had to make, and I could hear the popcorn popping in the kitchen, and the alluring smell of melting butter in a pot. Joseph muttering away, as he prepared it. That popcorn, a puffy salty collapsing death. I would not eat a piece of it.”

“Then he left. Mom went out to talk to him. I lay against the pillow and aged many years in that hour on my own.”