What's the Word? Literary Feasts > Comments > "Review of What's the Word? Literary Feasts"
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- Geo Beach
- Username: geo
- Location: Anchorage, AK
- Joined PRX: Sep 06, 2003
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- "What's the Word? Literary Feasts"
- Summary: In literature, feasts often serve as central events in telling a story.
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Review of What's the Word? Literary Feasts
Geo Beach
Posted on November 29, 2004 at 07:27 AM
So it's hard to tell which might be better, the book or the radio.
The three vignettes of "Literary Feasts" deliciously gloss the arcs of the story, novel, and poem ("Babette's Feast", Like Water for Chocolate, and "Inviting a Friend to Supper") with narratives the listener can apprehend, even during meal prep. There's just enough underpinning of sound, not distracting like a movie soundtrack, but entwined with the words, an illuminated manuscript.
The meat of the feast is Kari Salkjelsvik, a Norwegian who specializes in 19th Century Mexican literature. She speaks a perfect mole, hot and sweet, as she explicates the tradition of oral-to-written evolution of story, the fortune cookie of Laura Esquivel's novel. Sarah Webster Goodwin on Isak Dinesen and Gail Kern Paster on Ben Jonson rise up to make solid wholegrain slices to the sandwich.
I love the fun form-content tricks throughout, as where Paster underlines the verses where Jonson jokes that some pastry or cheeses at his supper might come wrapped in paper with his poems upon it.
"Literary Feasts" is perfect following an early-ending weekend All Things Considered program, when listeners' minds are more tuned to the artistic than journalistic, hungry not for mere calories, but culture.