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    Umami
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    Umami
    Unavailable
    Umami
    Ebook260 pages5 hours

    Umami

    By Laia Jufresa

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Ms. Jufresa: Where the f*#! did you learn to tell a story so well?”
    Álvaro Enrigue, award-winning author of Sudden Death

    It started with a drowning.

    Deep in the heart of Mexico City, where five houses cluster around a sun-drenched courtyard, lives Ana, a precocious twelve-year-old who spends her days buried in Agatha Christie novels to forget the mysterious death of her little sister years earlier. Over the summer she decides to plant a milpa in her backyard, and as she digs the ground and plants her seeds, her neighbors in turn delve into their past. The ripple effects of grief, childlessness, illness and displacement saturate their stories, secrets seep out and questions emerge Who was my wife? Why did my Mom leave? Can I turn back the clock? And how could a girl who knew how to swim drown?

    In prose that is dazzlingly inventive, funny and tender, Laia Jufresa immerses us in the troubled lives of her narrators, deftly unpicking their stories to offer a darkly comic portrait of contemporary Mexico, as whimsical as it is heart-wrenching.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOneworld Publications
    Release dateJul 7, 2016
    ISBN9781780748931
    Unavailable
    Umami

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    Reviews for Umami

    3.5/5

    29 ratings6 reviews

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    • 5/5
      The stories of five people living in an apartment court in Mexico City. What they remember, how they interact with one another and with their families. They face loss, coming of age, love, dislocation, and family problems. It's all told with an underlying empathy. The language is wonderful--the translator must have quite a time with the word play created by one character who makes up names for "new" colors. I loved this one.
    • 1/5
      Thinking of this novel as a series of interconnected short stories made this somewhat easier to stomach -- but not much. I was excited to hear that this book was about contemporary life in Mexico City, but the characters were so odd that I still feel like I haven't read a book about Mexico City. These strange, somewhat crazy characters could have been strange, somewhat crazy people living anywhere. Was this book magical realism? Possibly, but I don't think so. I really think this was a group of mentally ill people who lived in the same house, and influenced each other to be just a little more nuts.I also suspect that the language of this book made it hard to be well translated. I can't imagine how the translator managed to work with Marina's made-up colors.
    • 4/5
      Enjoyed this interesting look at life after loss in a small community in Mexico City.
    • 5/5
      Not an easy book, but in the end a fulfilling one, Umami is about loss, violence, growth, being a parent, being a child, and about gardening, preparing, tasting and consuming food. Ana is a girl growing up in Mexico City in a small apartment complex where each of the five houses is named after a taste; sour, bitter, salty, sweet, and umami. She mourns her little sister, Luz, lost to drowning. Alfonso, who has lost his wife to cancer, is the landlord. What the artist Marina has lost is not clear to her.The story skips back and forth in time from 2001 to 2004, and also skips among two or three narrators, sometimes in ways that confuse the reader. Well, it confused me. At page twenty-two I was ready to give it up. By page fifty-three or so I realized it had grabbed me. Slow start. Long and complex middle. Satisfying finish. Like a good meal.
    • 5/5
      An amazing story. I could not put this book down. Magical and beautifully written.
    • 5/5
      Such a very sad book. The lightheartedness gives way to insanity and sadness.

      1 person found this helpful