In The Sweetest Fruits, Monique Truong has rescued from obscurity the life of an author famous in his time for his travel and food writing, and recreated through her imagination and artistry the many-sided lives of the women closest to him. Each woman’s story reveals new detail about the life of Patricio Lafcadio Hearn who was born on a Greek island in 1850 with a Greek mother and an Irish father. During his 54 years, he lived in Greece, Ireland, the USA, Martinique, and Japan, changing his name slightly as he settled in those countries.
The novel begins with a short excerpt from Hearn’s fictional biography, written by a journalistic colleague of his in Ohio. Elements of the biography introduce the three main sections of the novel, recollections of Hearn from his Greek mother and his African American and Japanese wives. While Hearn’s emerging story is interesting, its main function in the novel is to link the lives of these three vibrant and well-realised women characters.
Truong has used first-person narrative for the accounts of the three main women in the novel, skilfully giving each a voice to reflect their historical time, culture, level of education and life circumstances as well as their unique personality. Their reflections about their lives and the role Hearn played in them are rich in the sights, smells, feel and tastes of their surroundings.
As suggested by the title, taste is the dominant sense in Truong’s writing. Like her subject in his time, Monique Truong is a food writer as well as a novelist. The titles of her previous books, The Book of Salt and Bitter in the Mouth, also reflect her fascination with taste. Descriptions of meals and their ingredients endow the novel with a tactile sense of time and place as well as providing the reader with vicarious pleasure.
The title also carries a figurative meaning. ‘The sweetest fruits’ appears several times to describe a moment of pure delight in one or other of the women’s lives. In many ways, the novel is a celebration of ordinary life and its everyday pleasures.
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