Curry, Naben Ruthnum
Curry, Naben Ruthnum
List: $19.95 | Sale: $13.97
Club: $9.97

Curry
Eating, Reading, and Race

Author: Naben Ruthnum

Narrator: Matthew Edison

Unabridged: 3 hr 16 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: ECW Press

Published: 03/12/2019


Synopsis

No two curries are the same. This Curry asks why the dish is supposed to represent everything brown people eat, read, and do. Curry is a dish that doesn’t quite exist, but, as this wildly funny and sharp essay points out, a dish that doesn’t properly exist can have infinite, equally authentic variations. By grappling with novels, recipes, travelogues, pop culture, and his own upbringing, Naben Ruthnum depicts how the distinctive taste of curry has often become maladroit shorthand for brown identity. With the sardonic wit of Gita Mehta’s Karma Cola and the refined, obsessive palette of Bill Buford’s Heat, Ruthnum sinks his teeth into the story of how the beloved flavor calcified into an aesthetic genre that limits the imaginations of writers, readers, and eaters. Following in the footsteps of Salman Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands, Curry cracks open anew the staid narrative of an authentically Indian diasporic experience.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Pam

Naben Ruthnum’s book is an interesting look into South East Asian experience in the 20th and 21st century diaspora to the West. He is a young 2nd generation Canadian whose parents came to British Columbia from Mauritius. “Curry” is said by Ruthnum to be a “metaphor for connection, nostalgia, homecomi......more

I enjoyed this extended essay that looks at curry as a cultural signifier. Curry is Ruthnum’s starting point for a rumination on race and representation in pop culture and literature. To use an analogy that will no doubt drive Ruthnum crazy, his prose has just the right amount of fiery wit, spicy hu......more