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Summary
Summary
"A glorious treat awaits you at the literary table of Donia Bijan." --Adriana Trigiani
Set against the backdrop of Iran's rich, turbulent history, this exquisite debut novel is a powerful story of food, family, and a bittersweet homecoming. When we first meet Noor, she is living in San Francisco, missing her beloved father, Zod, in Iran. Now, dragging her stubborn teenage daughter, Lily, with her, she returns to Tehran and to Café Leila, the restaurant her family has been running for three generations. Iran may have changed, but Café Leila, still run by Zod, has stayed blessedly the same--it is a refuge of laughter and solace for its makeshift family of staff and regulars.
As Noor revisits her Persian childhood, she must rethink who she is--a mother, a daughter, a woman estranged from her marriage and from her life in California. And together, she and Lily get swept up in the beauty and brutality of Tehran.
Bijan's vivid, layered story, at once tender and elegant, funny and sad, weaves together the complexities of history, domesticity, and loyalty and, best of all, transports readers to another culture, another time, and another emotional landscape.
Author Notes
Donia Bijan left her native Iran in 1978. After graduating from UC Berkeley, she attended the Cordon Bleu in Paris and ran her acclaimed restaurant, L'Amie Donia, in Palo Alto, for ten years. Her memoir, Maman's Homesick Pie , was published in 2011.
Reviews (3)
Booklist Review
Noor is lost in more ways than one. Having been set adrift in her adopted country of America after discovering her husband's infidelity, she returns home to Iran at her father's invitation, her teenage daughter reluctantly in tow. Noor hasn't been back to Tehran in the decades since her father sent her and her brother to California to escape the brutal post-revolution regime. Now she must put on a head scarf when entering Iranian airspace, and her daughter can only swim at a females-only pool. But among all the changes, her father's restaurant remains a community hub, its food and hospitality offering solace from the troubled world outside. As befits a restaurateur's household, in Noor's family their love is beautifully expressed through the meals they create together. For the most part, Iran's politics seem to exist on the periphery of their lives, which makes the sudden intrusions of the authorities all the more startling. Bijan has crafted a richly layered story of the deep connections within a family, resilient links that survive tragedy and distance.--Thoreson, Bridget Copyright 2017 Booklist
Kirkus Review
This lyrical debut novel, an immigrant saga and coming-of-age story, provides a tantalizing look at Iran pre- and post-revolution.It begins with a present-day reunion: Noor, sent to America to study when the Islamists took over in the 1970s, has returned to Tehran to visit her beloved father, Zod. She is accompanied by her teenage daughter, LilyNoor and the girl's father are divorcedwho wants no part of the homecoming. The ailing Zod runs a diminished version of Caf Leila, once a celebrated restaurant with an adjoining hotel and lush garden, where Noor and her brother grew up: "[It] contained their history, everything important had happened here," the author writes. "It had been her entire world, an oasis where on hot summer afternoons they drank iced mint sherbets under a canopy of trees." The book then flashes back, filling in the story of how Zod's parents emigrated from Russia to Iran, his studies in Paris as a young man, and his blissfully happy marriage to Noor's mother, Pari. It also traces Noor's often lonely life as an migr in northern California. In Tehran again, the focus shifts to Lily and her transition from a belligerent wild child to an almost grown-up who begins to embrace her Persian roots. There is drama aplenty in these pagesinvolving Pari's untimely death, in particularbut everything feels authentic; the writing is precise and self-assured. The author, an Iranian migr who became a chef in America (publishing a recipe-laced memoir, Maman's Homesick Pie, 2011), sprinkles her novel with sensuous descriptions of food, underlining its connection to memory. And she tells her story from multiple perspectives, creating sympathetic characters with rich inner lives. If the ending isn't completely satisfying, it's at least pleasantly unexpected. Poignant and absorbing, the book explores the pull not only of family, but of the place we first call home. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
For eight decades, Tehran's Café Leila has dispensed fresh, inventive fare and comfort. Second-generation proprietor Zod -Yadegar, esteemed for his culinary improvisation and limitless hospitality, sturdily preserves the eatery as a haven for locals and longtime staff. However, the third generation manifests little of Zod's tenacity: once--indomitable daughter Noor, dispatched to America 30 years ago in the wake of tragedy, now returns, freshly heartbroken and emotionally adrift, in the grudging company of teenaged daughter Lily. As Lily's guileless responses to brutal realities of post-revolution Iran ultimately reawaken Noor's sense of purpose, narrator Deepti Gupta channels the resurgence beautifully. Gupta differentiates characters' ages adeptly and paces her delivery to afford full enjoyment of lovingly depicted recipe preparation and sensory imagery that celebrates the unique setting, the restorative powers of nature, and the alchemy that transforms ingredients into compassion. VERDICT Bijan's graceful, satisfying tale of intergenerational love, individual and cultural identity, and persevering humanity will have readers-especially fans of Diana Abu-Jaber's Crescent, Nicole Mones's The Last Chinese Chef, and stories by Adriana Trigiani, Lisa See, or Jhumpa Lahiri-yearning to seek out Café Leila and order the pomegranate soup. Highly recommended for public libraries. ["A rich helping of Iran's complex food, culture, and political history": LJ 5/1/17 starred review of the Algonquin hc.]-Linda Sappenfield, Round Rock P.L., TX © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Noor stood at the sink with her sleeves rolled up peeling yellow potatoes and dropping them into a water bath. The long blade of her knife, sharpened without a scratch, gleamed on the chopping board. Her father believed that anything cut with a knife is tastier than mauling it in a food processor, so even in her modern San Francisco kitchen, she didn't own one and took special care of her knives. She liked to use her black cast-iron skillet to cook the onions with crumbled sage from the dried bouquets above her stove, cooking them in oil until they were quite tender before adding the sliced potatoes. Already the onions' sweetness wafted through the house, settling into the linens. She knew that her daughter would not like the pungent smell, so she closed her bedroom door and opened the tall windows to the cool morning air and the sound of a faraway lawnmower. Most of her recipes came from her father, but Noor learned how to make the luscious potato cake from Nelson's mother. The recipe her mother-in-law had whispered into Noor's ear was the authentic one used by Nelson's great-grandmother. In its own unpresumptuous way, the Spanish Tortilla is an honest love omelet, and every bite must be suffused with fragrant olive oil--in this case, too much of a good thing is not a sin. Even when Noor was an amateur and the potatoes were sometimes raw, Nelson would say, "Oh my God! That was the best tortilla of my whole life!" Which of course wasn't true, but he was acknowledging the effort of peeling and slicing immense quantities of potatoes. What she loved most about Spanish food was its lusty simplicity, so unlike the gastronomical somersaults of French cuisine or the complexity of the Persian food she grew up with. When she was little she could eat pyramids of saffron rice and rich meat stews, but she now associated the colors and perfumes of her husband's native cuisine with their courtship, with paddleboats and honeymoons and champagne in silver buckets, with flamenco and candlelight and little fried sardines with sea salt by the water. Her postcards were menus, smudged and wine-stained, saved from their meals, addressed to herself and read carefully like romance manuals. With just two hours to prepare a picnic, there would be no time to get her nails done before going to work. It seemed a waste of time when she could better spend that hour layering rows of cured black olives with roasted red peppers. There were still cucumbers and radishes to slice, strawberries to wash. She thought about how Nelson would point at each bowl like a giddy child and speculate with excitement on what the food would taste like and then enjoy it all a hundred times more than painted fingernails. And when would they ever be as eager to celebrate as now, as today, their sixteenth anniversary, on a ferry over to Angel Island at dusk? They saw so little of each other lately that her heart was set on this annual tradition, which coincided with the first days of spring, when they would break away from work to escape to the harbor, leaving their patients in the care of their colleagues. "There we are," she said to herself. "I just have the lemon left." She cut a lemon into eighths and placed it with sprigs of cilantro on a blue butter dish from a set they were given as a wedding present, then rinsed the knife under hot water, drying it with a dish towel before placing it in the drawer. From the cupboard she took a wicker picnic basket and put it on the kitchen island to begin the careful assembly of silver, two china plates and crystal flutes, each item nestled between linen-covered tiers. No matter how hungry they were, there was a certain slowness to unpacking the basket, to unfurling their napkins and popping the champagne, that made the afternoon last longer, allowing them more time to tell each other stories they had kept to themselves until now. It was as if before Nelson she had eaten in the dark, and when he came into her life their meals became as companionable and good as grilling sausages and peppers over an open fire under the stars. On the counter lay a note for her daughter that she would be home late, with instructions on how to heat the veggie lasagna when she returned from volleyball practice. Lily had only recently become a finicky eater, vowing not to swallow anything that could walk, fly, or swim, but Noor felt safe with pasta. All that was left was to brew a thermos of black coffee and remove the tortilla from the mold before leaving for the hospital. She hummed and flitted about the kitchen like a moth in a kind of ecstasy, catching a glimpse of her flushed face in the glass oven door, her cheeks ablaze. The hospital break room was small and sparsely furnished with a watercolor painting and not much more than the necessities of a microwave and a refrigerator. Here the staff relished any indulgence, from party napkins and frosted cakes to the contents of their lunch boxes, which could be anything from barbecued chicken to carrot raisin salad--whatever added cheer to the drab decor and their long shifts. Thus they broke into wild applause with the appearance of flowers, especially from boyfriends and husbands. The anniversary bouquet of red roses for Noor arrived just as she started her shift, and the nurses paused their lunchtime banter to tease her good-naturedly when she brought her flowers into the break room. Noor took the flowers to the sink to clip their stems. She rinsed a vase and filled it with cool water, then carefully cut the thick ends of the two dozen roses with surgical scissors before placing them in the vase on the nurses' table. There was an outburst of sympathy when Noor read Nelson's note out loud: " Mi vida , can we postpone our picnic? I'm so sorry, I have a surgery this afternoon." This had never happened before. She said nothing and sat down with her arms wrapped around herself. It was good how disappointment slowed things down so she could ease back into the chair with her coffee and look out on the spray of roses, letting the chatter continue without her. Amy took her hand and squeezed it as if they were thinking the same thing, but Noor was thinking about the basket in the trunk of her car beneath a blue-and-white checked tablecloth. What about all that food? she thought. There's no sense in wasting the tortilla; he has to eat after all. She would drop it off for him after work. With that, she went to check on her patients, who looked at her kindly and with renewed relief as if she had been gone for weeks. Nelson was an in-demand heart surgeon, though he rarely missed family occasions and even managed to coach Lily's soccer team. Noor would have walked to cardiology when her shift ended, but being on the other end of the compound, it was easier to drive rather than carry the food over. Her eyes were focused on finding a parking space until they were drawn to a familiar shape near an unfamiliar car. Nelson, in pale blue scrubs, stood in the parking lot at arm's length of a nurse Noor met once at a staff Christmas party. He leaned forward to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear and she smiled up at him. Noor had just pulled in, and without needing to see or hear more she knew the affection in this small gesture revealed everything between them. One glance told her what was lost and could not be mended. A little gasp of surprise escaped her lips. Without thinking, she drove straight home and unpacked the picnic as if it had simply rained and there was a change of plans. She threw away the olives and the peppers, dumped the tortilla in the garbage, and poured the champagne down the drain. As she washed the Tupperware, she slipped her wedding ring off her soap-slippery finger and left it by the kitchen sink. Then, seeing the school bus across the street, she ran outside and startled Lily with a hug. Excerpted from The Last Days of Café Leila: A Novel by Donia Bijan All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.