Sound Bites
by Alex Kapranos
Penguin
Alex Kapranos is the lead singer and guitarist for
the disturbingly popular pop group Franz Ferdinand. Other than the fact
that he's a former line cook, there's no real reason to believe that a
book of essays about meals he's eaten while on tour is going to be any
good. The penumbra of his fame ensures that the book will be reviewed
and purchased — it could be, in fact, utterly self-indulgent crap, and
still be a financially viable product for Penguin.
It's therefore mildly shocking that Sound Bites turns out to be
one of the best food books written in recent years. The writing is
clean, elegant and poetic; Kapranos confines himself to brief essays
that pack maximum sensory punch. The form was originally imposed upon
him by the limited space given to his food
column in the Guardian that spawned the book, but the
forced economy of print journalism hasn't stopped other authors from
sprawling into self-indulgent windbaggery when they finally get a
nearly unlimited blank canvas within which to work.
Kapranos embraces the minimalist approach, however, and the result is
a book that is almost effortless to read, packing, as it does, dozens
of moments of comedy, horror, sensual pleasure and exotic travel into
a tiny paperback that clocks in under 150 pages. Ounce for ounce, it
may be the most engaging book written in any genre for quite some
time.
Sound Bites embraces food from many angles, not content simply
to catalogue glorious epiphanies and delicacies. This is a book
Rachael Ray could not and would not write. Sure, Kapranos waxes
eloquent about the dramatic apple/bacon/cheese pancakes of Utrecht, and
the beef cuts of Buenos Aires. But he also gives readers passages such
as this one, about prepping pheasants for the table:
Because he's been hanging for twelve days, he's ripe,
and [the feathers] come off easily. I try to be gentle. When I'm
careless, his skin rips, revealing the yellowy fat underneath. His
dignity is plucked until he's naked apart from the feathers around his
head. He looks like a murdered gangster, humiliated in death, wearing
nothing but his trilby and brilliantine. His bumpy skin is bruised a
violent purple from where he was shot. I carve the lead from his
wounds.
Kapranos, in short, doesn't shy away from the ugly parts of eating —
the death and slaughter, for example, that goes into making a great
non-vegetarian meal, or the gritty side of street food, which he
celebrates with as much (or more) passion than the upscale stuff he
wolfs down whenever he has the opportunity.
Diverse from a culinary perspective, Sound Bites covers a great
deal of geographic ground as well. From Madrid to Sydney to Osaka to
Edinburgh, Kapranos dips into food with a sympathetic abandon, and the
stories ring with authenticity — sometimes meals don't come off
as planned, sometimes the best meal in Montreal is Iranian, and
sometimes big set-ups pack disappointing payoffs. The authenticity of
the book is its strength — the framing of an essay doesn't spoil
the ending for you, because it wasn't pre-conceived.
The book's illustrations are equally earnest and unconventional.
Produced by Andrew Knowles (the band's drummer), they are spare and
goofily expressive, capturing a lot of the low-key appeal of the art
produced by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry for the classic children's
book The Little Prince.
In short, yes, the guy's a rock star, not a professional food critic. Don't hold it against him — Sound Bites is a gorgeously austere effort that
would do any food writer or travel essayist proud.
— James Norton (jim@flakmag.com)
