Last night’s reading at Mr. B’s Emporium of Reading Delights was billed as “Cheese Night”, and included a tasting provided by the nearby Paxton & Whitfield. I went for the cheese, which was excellent, but I came away charmed by the book and it’s author.
The Telling Room by Michael Paterniti is in part a tale of a young man in search of of an artisan cheese so rare and expensive that he could not afford to taste it. It is a tale of an artisan cheesemaker who became world famous and then had his product stolen from him by big business. It is a tale of a deadly feud between proud Castilian men. But from listening to Paterniti talk I suspect that the book is mainly about story telling in a village community still small and isolated enough to have a tradition of oral story-telling.
Paterniti is a journalist, and it sounds like he has done a fine job of chronicling the story of the little Spanish village of Guzmán and its world famous cheese. But he has come away from the job fascinated by process of oral story-telling. I couldn’t help, listening to him, wishing that he he had been a folklorist instead. I want to read his book for the insights I think it will have into how people told stories before they were written down. I also wanted to talk to him about books like Cat Valente’s The Orphan’s Tale, in which digression is raised to a fine art. Still, it is always good to find someone who takes pleasure in footnotes.
For those interested, the cheeses in the tasting were: