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Mark Kurlansky: Boogaloo on 2nd Avenue : a novel of pastry, guilt, and music. Jonathan Cape, 2005.
With a title like that, how could I possibly resist! Without that title, I’m sure I wouldn’t have picked it up. As it turned out, it wasn’t exactly about my kind of music, and the pastry was closely connected to the guilt theme of the book. I found the novel chaotic at times. Perhaps a bit more structure would have made it even better. Having said that, it stands out as a positive reading experience. We’re in New York around 1988, just before Dukakis lost to Bush in the presidential election, and there is a sense of change in the air, with real estate developers moving in on the poor neighbourhood, and money becomes a significant matter in life. The novel is centred around the Jewish Nathan Seltzer and his family. He lives in the truly multicultural neighbourhood, Lower East Side, where Latinos, Jews, Sicilians and Germans live side by side in comparably peace. There is a comic tone to the story and its many entertaining and/or fascinating characters. There’s Karoline, the daughter of the local pastry maker, who becomes the subject of Nathan’s fantasies (and eventually his mistress) with her scent of butter and her surrounding aura of creamy cakes. On the other end of the scale, we find Nathan’s uncle Nusan, who survived the Holocaust, and carries his secret fortune around in his scarf. The novel is packed with Jewish quotes and traditions, and Kurlansky paints a vivid and interesting portrait of life in this colourful community. Kurlansky is perhaps best known for his non-fiction writing, for instance Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World. He has also written the history of salt. In other words, he’s not a mainstream writer! Boogaloo was his first novel. You’ll find it at the Library at 802(73) Kur.
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