In this picture the book is shown upside-down to symbolise my totally negative impression about it.
“ The Food of Love” is a presumptuous, superficial and totally useless novel which has also the feature of being unpleasant and annoying.
It’s based on clichés and stereotypes which would be already obsolete in a B movie remake of “Roman Holiday”. In addition, we have to add that the female main character , unfortunately, has not a single ounce of the grace and elegant ingenuity of Audrey Hepburn, but is merely a provocative and fickle American art student.
We might define “The Food if Love” a totally wasted opportunity.
The idea at the basis of the novel, even though not that original and rather weak, could have been the inspiration for an unpretentious entertaining book.
The author takes as starting point a motif from Cyrano de Bergerac, the classic play by French author Edmond Rostand, and transforms the weapon of seduction from the art of poetry into culinary art.
Here is the old mechanism of the young handsome lady-killer, deprived of any talent, but so sexy and gorgeous, and his friend, not too charming physically, but extremely talented and deeply sensitive.
They both love the same girl; the talented one lends his skills secretly to the handsome guy, who lets the girl believe he can be so incredibly brilliant as well; she is completely fascinated while the merit is all in the talent of the friend who remains in the background.
At the end, all the pieces of the mosaic find again their right place and the girl realizes the truth and suddenly falls in love with the less handsome, but more interesting young man, forgetting immediately her former affair with the other one.
Unluckily not only is Capella not Rostand, but he’s not the refined expert of Italian daily life style he imagines himself to be either.
His little novel, written in a prose style which he would have liked to be spontaneous and entertaining, but is in effect banal and quite trivial, is stuffed with blunders and common place errors.
Anyone knows Italy a little less than just superficially, beyond the tourist clichés, can only be bored to death or annoyed reading this book.
Obviously the novel, the way it is, might work to please an audience of anglophone - mainly female – readers who have an artificially built up an idea of Rome and Romans, who may seem like salacious black curly -haired lady-killers , always seeking a one-night stand affair, as they pursue all female foreign tourists whom they charm with cheeky compliments as they ride their dashing “ scooters” in the chaotic traffic of the Italian capital city.
Mr. Capella, for mysterious reasons, decided to fill up his novel with a totally useless quantity of Italian words inserted into his English text, maybe in an attempt to create an illusion of authenticity and spontaneity to his patient readers.
Unfortunately too many of the Italian sayings he put in his characters’ mouths are misplaced and too many of the Italian words he used to describe food or ingredients are incorrect. Just to be generous, we might say that Mr. Capella is a victim of too many typos.
Tolstoy could allow himself the sublime intellectual snobbism to write a consistent part of the dialogues of” War and Peace” in French, making his masterpiece rather irksome and incomprehensible for his fellow compatriots, who need translation notes to read it, first of all because in the Russian high society of the pre-revolution period everybody was bilingual and French was the main language in their conversations, then, last but not least, because he was Tolstoy.
Now it happens that our Capella, besides being not Rostand, is not Tolstoy either... we can bitterly realize this by reading patiently his opus until the end.
Let’s give to Capella what is Capella's.
He has surely travelled over Italy a few times, has a smattering of Italian history and the Italian way of life, has visited several restaurants, read cookbooks and perhaps conversed with Italian chefs.
Contented with his learning, he has put all the data (right ones and wrong ones, reality and clichés) in a mental blender and has obtained this soupy dishwater, which he has served to us as if it was the most refined and delicious sauce.
Those who know the Italian language can only feel annoyance for the harsh contrast between the superficially romantic, hollywoodian plot and the useless and wrong, out-of-date dialectal obscene ,rough language he attributes to his poor characters in absolutely absurd circumstances.
Those who cannot understand Italian, on the other hand, will necessarily skip this profusion of foreign words which Capella wrote randomly without any translation or explanation in any note (with the exception of extremely vulgar expressions which he seems to have a kind of morbid pleasure in explaining to his gentle readers), so really it was a meaningless effort of authenticity and spontaneity on the part of our author.
If you want to know more about Italian regional cooking, which is definitely worthy, there are surely many other books which can help you for this purpose.
My wise and competent colleague, Grinning Cat 1, doesn’t agree with my severe slating, you can read her opinion on this not exactly unforgettable book clicking HERE