The Last Days of Cafe Leila, by Donia Bijan A Review

When we dream, some psychology studies claim, there is no sense of taste. In dreams we can see food, touch it, note its color, but the taste escapes us. This phenomenon came to mind when I read Donia Bijan’s novel The Last Days of Café Leila. Food: its preparation, its aesthetics, its cultural links, its place in family traditions and relationships, winds its way throughout this engaging tale of three generations of a family coming of age in three different worlds. Set against pre and post - revolutionary Iran at its epicenter, the novel follows the history and evolution of the colorful Café Leila of Tehran. In the novel, Café Leila is forged from the artistic imagination and culinary genius of Russian immigrants, becoming a refuge against violent extremism, a piquant, albeit distant memory in America, and a force of reckoning in a final homecoming.

Yet despite the colors, the sounds and the evocations of food, there is a recurrent theme of withheld taste that springs forth throughout the novel. A woman betrayed by her husband throws away a carefully prepared meal, denying both of them the taste. A rebellious daughter discards untouched her mother’s lovingly prepared lunches. A self sacrificing family patriarch, dying of pancreatic cancer, appreciates food still for its visual aesthetics and the vicarious enjoyment of watching others partake of its taste. It is almost as if the novel itself is aware that the story, so compellingly real, is yet a tale like one told in a dream, with that very last sense, the sense of taste, proving to be elusive.

The pursuit of taste and its slipping away, like in dreams, seems to parallel the striving towards finding home - a place where all one’s senses come alive. In this regard, I thought that The Last Days of Café Leila resonated so well with me, not only on an aesthetic but a personal level. I love food: the study of food, the history of food, the preparation of food. The ritual of preparations, the tastes and smells of food always evoke home to me - and not just the home of my upbringing but the home of Russian ancestry, the home of my ex-patriot life in China, the homes of people I once knew and spiritually reconnect with through the recipes they shared.

I love Persian art as well, in particular Persian drawings and tile work. At least in my illustration work, this has probably had a greater influence on my art than my formal training. Despite all my education and experimentation I always come home to a taste of Persian art when going to museums. What more perfect a novel could there be than one which embodies, at the risk of sounding glib, all my favorite things? One that I experience almost viscerally in scenes where characters cup their hands to make pierogies, and I, too, feel the delicate weight of filled dough in my hands? Perhaps it is just the artistry of the writer to allow a reader to "be there," yet most assuredly all senses were engaged for this reader.

Throughout The Last Days of Café Leila, characters search for, and find home with all its tastes and identities, revealed in increments of bittersweet awakenings. Even with the forays in to the dark side of humanity, the confrontations with the shortcomings of society and self, there is that overriding continuity of the art of food. More than fuel for the body, it is the taste of all that is worth remembering and preserving.

Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Gene: An Intimate History and an Image in Miniature

This week I finished two projects. One was an epic journey through The Gene: An Intimate History, by Siddhartha Mukherjee. The other project was the completion of a miniature portrait commission. Mukherjee’s The Gene, was my official "waiting room" literature. These are books that I read while waiting in doctors’ offices - and there have been plenty this year. It took about five months of waiting rooms and time between other obligations to finish this amazing book. It was worth every minute of the literary journey. I call this a literary journey because this work of both science and art is resplendent with literary allusions interspersed with biography, and all spun together in an epic tale of social, scientific and ethical history. In short, it is a masterpiece.

I read this book initially as a refresher for my own study in genetics and also to come to terms with hereditary illness. I was surprised to find that in writing the book, the author was also coming to terms with his own family history of a devastating hereditary mental illness - hence the sub text of an intimate history. And yet, despite the obligatory discussion of these and other sobering realities, Siddhartha Mukherjee manages to maintain a sense of humor in much of the telling. As one who devotes an inordinate amount of time to thinking up irreverent puns, jokes and rhymes, I could not help but admire the liberal sprinkling of such chortle inducing literary devices throughout this book. One fine example was the description of the abbot who oversaw Mendel’s experiments. The abbot’s prudishness would not tolerate observations involving the coerced breeding of mice, but "didn’t mind giving peas a chance."

My other project, although a small commission, carried its own specialness as it was my first commission in a long time, the first commission from a new client, and apparently the first commission of art work for this new client. The painting was a miniature portrait of his mother circa 1955. I am not certain if confluences find their way to me or I to them, but there were certainly moments of synchronicity between reading The Gene: An Intimate History, and painting this charming little portrait. I was told, for instance, that the subject of my portrait had eighteen siblings. That is most assuredly a copious gene pool. Yet there was also a subtle, more intimate reckoning that coincided with making this painting and something I read in Mukherjee’s text. In one of the last chapters there was a study of twins reared separately in order to determine whether or not behavior had mostly social/environmental influence or genetic ones and how the two might interact. One question submitted to the twins in the study caught my eye: "Do you have original art in your home?" It may be arbitrary but the question was supposed to indicate a higher educational/social standing. What interested the researchers was that there was a very high social and behavioral correlation in twins reared apart, even if their social and economic backgrounds were different. So I suppose that twins reared apart might both have original art in their homes regardless of whether their adoptive parents or friends told them to have that or not. But what interested in me was why the researchers used that question as a benchmark as a social class indicator.

So I had to mull that question over a bit, just as my client considered the commission for a while before acting upon it. Historically, people who commissioned art were powerful figures: the popes, the Medicis, aristocrats. And commissioning a likeness - of oneself or another, held a special place in such investments. For most of us, we can trace our visual lineage only as far back as nineteenth century photography allows. (I recall feeling a twinge of jealousy when a friend with an aristocratic background showed me photographs of her ancestors going back to the nineteenth century and then revealed the eighteenth and seventeenth century miniature paintings that extended before ) Perhaps even more importantly, we can only extend our visage posterity to that end point at which photographs deteriorate - two hundred years tops when archival inks and papers are used, only decades if not. But paintings like this tiny oil on panel are made with earth and minerals and as such are written in stone. So perhaps commissioning a likeness means more than just having an art work in the home. Perhaps it means a claim to a bit of the power of the Medicis - power to stake one’s place in things that outlive the ordinary.

More Revisions in Paintings

Finished the fifth painting restoration. This takes care of all the paintings that were recent returns. The older returns will have to wait until I finish a small commission. This landscape took a while because it required resurfacing entirely. But I think that it was well worth the effort. As mentioned in my earlier post, the painting had problems with furrows in the base coat which required sanding everything down and starting over again.

The new painting uses much tinier brush strokes, broadens the expanse of sky, slims down the trees, and adds a substantial amount of resolution and detail. There is still some indication of furrows in the repaired painting, but at least not as pronounced. The old painting, at left, is shown for comparison.

While working on this painting I would periodically tap upon the grisaille of a tiny portrait in the making to test it for tack. The portrait is based upon a photograph of a woman circa 1955. Today it appears to be dry enough to work on tomorrow morning. Timed just right this time - one project finished and the other one ready to go.  The final color painting will be adjusted for likeness.  Right now she looks a bit like my Aunt Margaret.

Return of the Prodigal Paintings

The last month of the year in any business, large or small, usually means inventory and clearance. I had been too unwell for years to do the kind of inventory and clearance required to keep my studio under control, well equipped and uncluttered. This year, however, still being mindful of the fact that I am running this body at about 30% of its former capabilities, I decided to tackle the problem of an overhaul. That actually required starting in October, due to my slow and awkward limbs. Yet even at 30%, some things can be accomplished.

Although it took five years and the help of a friend, I was finally able to get my unsold paintings back from Beaufort. All of them needed some form of repair, some more than others. I discarded two frames and restored another frame. A painting of an old shed in Blackville had paint torn off the top so I patched that up.

The two remaining paintings required extra work. One needed to be repainted entirely. I was never happy with it and am not surprised that the dull colors and bad frame caused people to pass it by. I repainted it entirely, changing the scene from spring to autumn.

As the grisaille on a small painting dries, I turn to that fifth painting, which I will also paint over again, almost from scratch. Scratch is indeed the operative word here because I noticed several large grooves in the ground underneath the painting that unfortunately appeared through the surface. They remind me of the scratches I used to make in spackling compound when I worked in construction.

Recalling those years spent trying to get spackling on sheet rock smooth, I’ve decided to go at this last painting with an eye towards construction. I sanded down the best I could, filled in the offending grooves, then sanded again. Body willing, today I’ll paint that last one over again.