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.