Translated by Jamie Bulloch
Purchased at The Book Depository
The process started, in fact, from the very opening:
It was neither a sign nor a coincidence that we were going to have mussels that evening. Yes, it was slightly unusual, and afterwards we spoke of the mussels as a sign, but they definitely weren’t; we also said they were a bad omen — that’s nonsense too. Nor were the mussels a coincidence. This evening of all evenings, we’d say, we decided to eat mussels. But it really wasn’t like that; you couldn’t call it a coincidence. After the event, of course, we tried to interpret our decision as a sign of coincidence, because what came in the wake of our abortive feast was so monumental that none of us have got over it yet.
(A note on the quotes in this review: The Mussel Feast is only 105 pages but, true to monologue form, the paragraphs in the narrative extend for several pages. Vanderbeke’s prose and its pace are vital to the book’s success, so I want to quote her — but I warn that what is excerpted here are mere snatches from far longer passages.)
Those opening sentences did two things for me. First, for a monologue to work, the reader needs not just to be hearing the narrator’s story but to be a participant in it. The author immediately does that: note that there is no “I” but a lot of “we’s” in those six sentences. The narrator may be looking back on what happened — the reader is encouraged to become part of the “we” who were there as well.
Secondly, there is the combined sense of foreboding (“a bad omen”, “our abortive feast”) and desire for denial (“that’s nonsense, too”, “interpret our decision”). We know from the start that the evening did not turn out well. We also know that the narrator doesn’t want to acknowledge what happened or why but the mere fact that she is engaging in the monologue indicates that she is eventually going to have to do that — the reader is encouraged to become a fellow traveler on that journey.
The feast of the title is in honor of the father’s return from a presentation: “…that day, which we knew in advance was a special, even historic day for our family, for this business trip was to be the last step on my father’s path to promotion”. Mussels were father’s favorite food: “My brother liked mussels too, whereas my mother and I never cared for them too much”.
While mother is painstakingly cleaning the mussels (“because my father hated nothing more than grains of sand crunching between his teeth”), the narrator and her brother are preparing the chips that will accompany them:
But we were allowed to cut the chips; you always have chips with mussels, I don’t care for them much, either, even though Mum cooks the best chips I have ever tasted. My brother, on the other hand, goes crazy for them, they’re unrivalled, he always said; once he even invited all his friends who doubted and teased him about the chips to our house, and my mother made chips for them all, and my brother was terribly proud of her. Since then we’d sometimes help prepare the chips; that evening we peeled the potatoes and cut them into thin batons, increasingly feeling twitchy. Afterwards we said that this was when we started to become anxious, when we suspected something was up; of course it was only afterwards that we knew what would happen. So maybe we were simply twitchy because we were waiting; we always felt twitchy when we waited for my father, there was always a certain tension.
There again is that foreboding, uncertainty and implications of denial and it has been ratcheted up a fair bit. The monologue diverts a bit to slip in some backstory: the mussels are to be cooked in “a massive pot” that the mother had brought from the East on one of her preliminary trips that set up their escape to West Berlin. These thoughts come to mind as the narrator contemplates the mussels cooking. “It’s mass murder, I said” — which prompts a response from her mother to stop thinking fanciful thoughts:
…although Mum harbored plenty of fanciful ideas herself; when my father was on business trips the three of us told each other the most fanciful stories, without ever being appalled. Before my father came home, however, all those fanciful ideas vanished, especially my mother’s. My father regarded flights of fancy as childish, my father stood for sober objectivity and reason, and of course my mother showed consideration for his objectivity and reason, conforming and switching to wifey mode when he came home. And when my mother said, what are you talking about, I knew at once that she had switched to wifey mode, and the rage of disgust which I felt toward the mussels was now directed at my mother. Aren’t we allowed to think any more, I said, but my mother said, is that what you call thinking, can’t you think something useful rather than those sinister thoughts. In our family sinister thoughts and fantasies were regarded as squandered thoughts, especially when my father was at home, and although he wasn’t there yet he might arrive at any moment.
That last quote comes from page 17 of the novella and by that point I was completely engaged in the narrator’s return to the mussel feast, particularly since a putative villain has now been identified. She had introduced enough detail and innocently raised enough disturbing questions about an event that we know turned out badly that I was more than willing to enrol in the memory. Suffice to say the slender volume supplies answers to all the questions that have been raised.
I realize I am copping out by not telling you more, but I figured this review would be of more value as an “enticement” than a complete overview. If you would like a more conventional (and thorough) review of the book, I would point you to the one that brought me to purchase it, Kimbofo’s at Reading Matters. In that review, she describes reading the book as like peeling an onion — I’ve peeled off the first couple layers, but I’ll leave finding the heart of the story to yourself. It is well worth the effort.
KevinfromCanada 