Oddly enough I heard about the book by watching the trailer for the movie that's just been made. I was so enthralled and scared by it that I got the book the next day and dove in. The plot is very basic, a woman (unnamed throughout the whole book) goes to a friend's vacation house in the mountains, during the night while she's asleep an invisible wall seemingly erects itself, boxing her into an area of the mountain. She is completely alone save for a dog, a cow, and a cat, everyone else is dead. She knows this because she can see other humans through the wall, but a terrible thing has happened to the outside world rendering everyone outside of her wall frozen in the place they were like a marble statue. She is the only one alive and inside her wall she must learn to survive. The book is told by our "woman" as three years into her solitude she decided to tell her story, not in the hopes that anyone will rescue her, or read it, but in the hopes of keeping her reason about her. There's not much I can say, it was terrifying, reflective, and moving. It's a simple book that seems to be about so many things, solitude, survival, loss, and relationships.
There is a fair amount of food that appears in this book, as eating, a basic need to survive, has become paramount in her thoughts. Our narrator must learn to farm, kill and skin deer and trout, and pick berries and apples, all to keep herself and her "family" alive. There is one food item however, that stood out to me, it happened very early on in the novel at a point where she had only been in the wall for about a month. It was a simple rice pudding that she prepares for herself one afternoon. The passage is very short, but it hit me directly.
"At lunchtime I cooked rice pudding, making do without sugar. Despite my economies, however, after only eight weeks I hadn't a single piece of sugar left, and in the future had to do without sweetness of any kind."
I think what struck me first was the rice pudding itself. I have fond memories of rice pudding. My father used to make it for us kids quite often, sometimes we had it for breakfast on winter mornings and sometimes it was prepared as a treat before bed. It is wonderfully homey and comforting. I began to wonder to myself and think of myself as that woman, and what that lunch time meal of rice pudding would mean. Eating the food of my father that would be out stone stiff in the world, how would I remember my family? Would the knowledge that I was eating one of the last sweet things in my lonely life make it worse?
There are days where our woman is so busy with work to keep herself alive that she never has time to think (a situation she prefers), and then there are days where she wakes and begins to think about the family she has lost.
"...it seemed certain to me that that the scale of catastrophe was enormous. Everything pointed to it: the absence of rescuers, the silence of human voices on the radio, and what little I had seen through the wall. Much later, when almost all hope had been extinguished in me, I still couldn't believe that my children were dead too, like the old man by the stream and the woman on the bench. If I think about my children today, I always see them as five-year-olds, and it strikes me that they'd left my life even then. That's probably the age at which all children begin to leave their parents' lives; quite slowly they turn into strangers. But that all happens so imperceptibly that you barely notice it. There were moments when that terrible possibility dawned on me, but like any other mother I very quickly suppressed the thought. I had to live, and what mother could live if she recognized the process?"
This passage to me highlights the depth of this book. It's not just an post-apocoliptic survival book, our narrator's total and complete solitude forces her to reassess her whole life, how she's lived it, what was really important and so on. As you can see the wall itself represents so many other things than the loss of humanity, it acts as a mirror, a way for our nameless woman, the representation of humanity that is left, to look inside and see all the things that were important, she is there to teach the reader to open their eyes to what they have.
I decided it would be best to ask my father for his rice pudding recipe, a way to learn it so that in a catastrophe, however earth shattering or perhaps only minor it might end up being, I would have one of the foods that would always bring me home.
Father's Rice Pudding:
Ingredients:
2 Cups white rice
3 cups of water
1 cup (plus more as needed of whole milk)
Dash of salt
1/4 teaspoon of vanilla (or almond) extract
1 Tablespoon of butter
1/2 cup (or more as you like) golden raisins
1/2 cup of brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon
dash of nutmeg
1 egg
Process:
Cook the rice in a pot with the 3 cups of water and 1 cup of milk and the dash of salt.
Let it cook down until most of the liquid is absorbed stirring constantly.
Check the rice for tenderness, you want it to be al dente, if it still needs more time, add more milk or water (which ever you like). Then, add the butter, raisins, brown sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg and egg.
Mix together and continue to simmer.
I also added a little more milk as well as I wanted it to be a little looser that what I had going. Keep stirring the whole time as as the rice gets softer and combines with the milk it will stick to the bottom of that pan and will become a nightmare to get off. As it cooks just keep checking the tenderness of the rice until it is as soft as you like it. Also feel free to add more brown sugar if you would like it to be sweeter.
As I ate I thought about the things I would prepare where I stranded alone on my own. What do I know about food and survival? What things would I prepare to help remember my family and the life I had lost, as well as help me feel safe in the new life I would have to live? This pudding would definitely be at the top of the list.
Tell me readers, what meal reminds you of your past, or even your life today? What would you prepare for yourself if you where left alone forever? What would comfort you?
Bon Appetite
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