In ‘Land of Milk and Honey,’ the novelist conjures a sensuous oasis from her own perilous world.
“That year of the pandemic, and my first book coming out during the pandemic, was one of deep disconnection from a lot of the things that used to be important to me,”says over a call late one summer afternoon, “including writing, including eating, and being part of community and just being in my body. Writing this book was a way to get back to a lot of that.”How Much of These Hills Is Gold
, which hit shelves April 2020, is a sensuous if complicated ode to hedonism. In it, a killing smog has blanketed the earth; strawberries are gone, then nuts and seeds and powdered basil. Life spans are shorter than they have been in three generations, borders are closed, and much of the world subsists on a miraculous mung-protein-soy-algal flour—entirely life-sustaining and utterly joyless.are independently selected by our editors.
While her billionaire employer is, at least initially, a shadowy presence—a sharky black eye peering out of a reversing car—his passionate and mercurial daughter, 20-year-old Aida, blazes into the chef’s consciousness full force, “shaggy furs above, stick legs below, with the slight stagger of a bird blown off course and stranded thousands of miles from its destination.” Her posh accent cloaks crude zingers. “He would eat a pig’s asshole if you called it calamari,” she says of her father.
The book arrived to Zhang chronologically, beginning with a prologue in which the chef appears as an older woman revisiting a pivotal year. The first line of the prologue: “One day, after my life is already over, a girl comes up to me at the back of the auditorium and says,” Throughout 2020, Zhang found herself largely unable to read fiction, turning instead to biographies of women artists like Georgia O’Keefe and Angela Carter.
“Because eating out was still deeply constrained,” Zhang says of her time writing the novel, “it was kind of an elegy, a way to experience food and the senses through the page when I couldn't access them in my body. I think that whenever we access something that we loved, or love through a memory, there’s this extra layer of emotional intensity embedded in it because we know that it is lost.
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