Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
|
Loading... Chef (2008)by Jaspreet Singh
   No current Talk conversations about this book.   ) Eiketske1004 | Sep 18, 2024 |  ) Rdra1962 | Aug 1, 2018 |  ) mamashepp | Mar 29, 2016 | ) mamashepp | Mar 29, 2016 | This book is told in two interwoven threads about 15 years apart. Kirpal 'Kip' Singh joins the Indian army and is sent to Srinigar, Kashmir as an apprentice chef in the kitchen of the commanding general in the 1980s. Kip’s father, a military hero, has died in a plane crash over the nearby Siachen glacier. Kip forms a close mentor-apprentice friendship with his immediate boss Chef Kishen. Kip has been given this posting as a fast track to promotion to officer rank like his father but instead, he finds his true calling within the kitchen. Chef Kishen is court-martialed and posted to the Siachen glacier as punishment whilst Kip takes over his kitchen duties but is becoming disillusioned with the Army. Some 15 later years Kip is no longer serving in the Army and has recently diagnosed with a terminal brain tumour. He finds himself invited to return to Srinigar to oversee the preparations of the wedding feast for the daughter of his former commanding officer who is now Governor of the region. Both threads are told against a backdrop of the on-going terrorist attacks by the indigent Muslim Kashmiris as well as fighting between Indian and Pakistani forces based either side of the nearby border. Kip is a Sikh and as such despite his father's reputation,is an outsider of the Hindu dominated Indian society. He is spoken at, usually by way of comparison to him and his dead father, rather than talked to. Jaspreet Singh grew up in Kashmir thus giving his novel a ring of authenticity. In particular he does a fine job recreating the conflicts in an area of the world which may never find peace. The author keeps his plots relatively simple leaving the reader know where the author stands but also allowing them to draw some important conclusions on their own. This novel has a broad reach and the author does a remarkable job of holding together his plots. His images of the colour and certain extent smell of Indian society he meets is very vivid. However, when I picked up the book I was hoping to learn a little more about an area and conflict that I am fairly ignorant of and on level it didn't quite fit the bill. That said given that this is the author's first novel it is a remarkable achievement. (  ) PilgrimJess | Feb 7, 2016 |
 To write about Kashmir is to enter contested territory. Calgary-based Jaspreet Singh (author of the short story collection Seventeen Tomatoes) sets his first novel, Chef, there in 2006, amongst an Indian general’s staff as the army faces its enemies on both sides of the mountainous border. After a 14-year absence, chef Kirpal Singh receives a summons from the General to cook at his daughter’s wedding to a Pakistani. Newly diagnosed with cancer, Kirpal decides to return from New Delhi to Kashmir, hoping to face his past. Singh intersperses poetry, journal entries, Kashmiri script, and, yes, recipes to create a melancholic world where death is forever hovering. The writing is spare, with a tendency to veer toward the fantastic. Singh writes like a poet but has difficulty maintaining such an ambitious style. Glimpses of India from the train read like a checklist, and food similes – an easy cliché when writing about India – get pushed too far: “Her face resembles a plate of samosas left overnight in rain”; “peaks flash like the inside of a tandoori”; etc.  The disputed region of Kashmir forms the elegiac backdrop to an episodic, image-rich work. Kirpal "Kip" Singh is a terminally ill chef summoned by his former employer, General Kumar, to cook one last feast for the wedding of his daughter. During the long train journey from Delhi to Srinigar, Kip recalls when, as a young, unassuming Sikh, he became trainee to eccentric Chef Kishen in the general's camp near the Siachen glacier, where Kip's soldier father had died years before. The chef becomes more than a mentor, and Kip's culinary awakening is a baptism of fire. When the chef is dismissed for a recipe gaffe, Kip takes over, but his subsequent involvement with a Muslim prisoner compromises his allegiance. The story is choppy and complex, the time sequences confusing, but there is much heady beauty and serious intent.  Brutality and violence, the politics tearing asunder India and Pakistan, and between them Kashmir, seethe and fester in a novel of stark beauty. Unusual and slow-moving, Chef , longlisted for the 2010 International Impac Dublin Literary Award, is written with eerie grace and quiet courage. Late in the novel, the narrator recalls a conversation he had had on the bus with the woman sitting in the seat beside him: “For five and a half hours, almost half of the way, we were silent to each other, lost in our own worlds, and then suddenly we started talking . . . She was a Kashmiri Hindu . . . she said her situation was a bit like the exiles in the epic Mahabharata . I apologised for my limited knowledge of Hindu epics. I grew up in the Sikh tradition, I confessed. She studied my face carefully. So why, sardar-ji , have you cut your hair and removed your turban?”
Kirpal Singh is travelling on the slow train to Kashmir. As India passes by the window in a stream of tiny lights, glistening fields and huddled, noisy towns, he reflects on his destination, which is also his past- a military camp to which he has not returned for fourteen years ... Kirpal, Kip to his friends, is timorous and barely twenty when he arrives for the first time at General Kumar's camp, nestled in the shadow of the mighty Siachen Glacier that claimed his father's life. He is placed under the supervision of Chef Kishen, a fiery, anarchic mentor with long earlobes and a caustic tongue, who guides Kip towards the heady spheres of food and women. 'The smell of a woman is a thousand times better than cooking the most sumptuous dinner, kid', he muses, over an evening beer. Kip is embarrassed - he has never slept with a woman, though a loose-limbed nurse in the local hospital has caught his eye. In Srinagar, Kashmir, a contradictory place of erratic violence, extremes of temperature and high-altitude privilege, Kip learns to prepare indulgent Kashmiri dishes such as Mughlai mutton and slow-cooked Nahari, as well as delicacies from Florence, Madrid, Athens and tokyo. Months pass and, though he is Sikh, Kip feels secure in his allegiance to India, the right side of this interminable conflict. The, one muggy day, a Pakistani 'terrorist' with long flowing hair is swept up on the banks of the river, and changes everything. Mesmeric, mournful and intensely lyrical, Chef is a brave and compassionate debut about hope, love and memory, set against the devastatingly beautiful, war-scarred backdrop of occupied Kashmir. No library descriptions found. 
|
LibraryThing Early Reviewers AlumJaspreet Singh's book Chef was available from LibraryThing Early Reviewers.  Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature American literature in English American fiction in English 2000-LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.35)
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Wikipedia in English
3