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Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race
Curry is a dish that doesn't quite exist, but, as this wildly funny and sharp essay points out, a dish that doesn't properly exist can have infinite, equally authentic variations. By grappling with novels, recipes, travelogues, pop culture, and his own upbringing, Naben Ruthnum depicts how the distinctive taste of curry has often become maladroit shorthand for brown identity. With the sardonic wit of Gita Mehta's Karma Cola and the refined, obsessive palette of Bill Buford's Heat, Ruthnum sinks his teeth into the story of how the beloved flavor calcified into an aesthetic genre that limits the imaginations of writers, readers, and eaters. Following in the footsteps of Salman Rushdie's Imaginary Homelands, Curry cracks open anew the staid narrative of an authentically Indian diasporic experience.
Naben Ruthnum won the Journey Prize for his short fiction, has been a National Post books columnist, and has written books and cultural criticism for the Globe and Mail, Hazlitt, and the Walrus. His crime fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Joyland, and his pseudonym Nathan Ripley's first novel will appear in 2018. Ruthnum lives in Toronto.
Naben Ruthnum won the Journey Prize for his short fiction, has been a National Post books columnist, and has written books and cultural criticism for the Globe and Mail, Hazlitt, and the Walrus. His crime fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Joyland, and his pseudonym Nathan Ripley's first novel will appear in 2018. Ruthnum lives in Toronto.
144 pages, Paperback
First published August 14, 2017
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About the author
Naben Ruthnum
10 books103 followersNaben Ruthnum is a Canadian writer, who has published work under both his own name and the pen name Nathan Ripley.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 77 reviews
July 26, 2023
Naben Ruthnum’s book is an interesting look into South East Asian experience in the 20th and 21st century diaspora to the West. He is a young 2nd generation Canadian whose parents came to British Columbia from Mauritius.
“Curry” is said by Ruthnum to be a “metaphor for connection, nostalgia, homecoming, and distance from family and country.” I’d say his second generation experience is quite different from his parent’s experience and his descendants experience will no doubt be different again, and all valid. My favorite parts of his book are his discussion of what he dismissively calls curry books and curry movies. They are often popular with a broad audience. His point of view is that nostalgia often ruins their art and doesn’t lead to validity.
Using the name “Riley” Ruthnum writes thrillers that don’t need “ Asianess.” I feel he is very conflicted and working out issues in this book. There is no reason that he shouldn’t write thrillers but I don’t see that other SE Asian writers should be dismissed for writing their experiences.
“Curry” is said by Ruthnum to be a “metaphor for connection, nostalgia, homecoming, and distance from family and country.” I’d say his second generation experience is quite different from his parent’s experience and his descendants experience will no doubt be different again, and all valid. My favorite parts of his book are his discussion of what he dismissively calls curry books and curry movies. They are often popular with a broad audience. His point of view is that nostalgia often ruins their art and doesn’t lead to validity.
Using the name “Riley” Ruthnum writes thrillers that don’t need “ Asianess.” I feel he is very conflicted and working out issues in this book. There is no reason that he shouldn’t write thrillers but I don’t see that other SE Asian writers should be dismissed for writing their experiences.
October 22, 2022
From the introduction: "Curry is a leaf, a process, a certain kind of gravy with uncertain ingredients surrounding a starring meat or vegetable. It's an elevating crust baked around previously bland foodstuffs. But it's also an Indian fairytale composed by cooks, Indians, émigrés, colonists, eaters, readers and writers."
I grew up in the U.K. where we followed the same pattern of meals each week. My mother prepared roast meat on Sunday, served slices of the meat cold on Monday, and then, curried the leftovers on Tuesday. Curry is part of the fabric of British life. In 2013, I was surprised and delighted to learn that fish and chips was no longer the national dish of Britain, it was now curry!
Growing up the U.K. we had a plethora of Indian restaurants, every town seemed to have one, and I assumed America would be similar. Imagine my astonishment to discover the opposite! There has been a distinct lack of an Indian restaurant in each town where I have lived since coming to America in 1990, and it is only within the past two years that an Indian restaurant opened nearby to where I live in the NW suburbs of Chicago.
My family loves curry and we have curry cookbooks that my sons brought back from their trip to India, which we continue to use to make dishes such as Paneer Jalfrezi and Paneer Makhani. Author Naben Ruthnum made me laugh out loud in Part 1 when he wrote self-deprecatingly that "Shelina Permalloo, a fellow first-generation child of Mauritians (but born in the U.K. and destined to be winner of the 2012 season of Masterchef, while I am a Canadian who can cook seven things pretty well)."
Ruthnum's writing style and tone is truly engaging and in Part 2: Reading - when Ruthnum asked "What is it that is exactly the same about every single vacation you have taken?" I immediately started to puzzle out the answer. Then, Ruthnum surprised and delighted me with his answer, which may be obvious to everyone else, "You, you're the same, no matter where you go there you are."
In part Part 3: Race - Ruthnum refers back to his years growing up brown in Canada. He writes, "The ways to not-belong as a brown teenager in white small-town Canada are even more complex than my Beavis haircut and Black Sabbath T-shirt could express in 1996. If Indian is a baggy term, South Asian is parachute pants."
Then regarding immigrants who have settled in America, "The elements that they miss they can go back for or simply feel nostalgic for. What would have been missed by not leaving is their lives, the substance of their careers, the families they made, their existence itself."
He goes on to write that "the success stories complicate feelings of longing for the past in a different land. But that's fine, stories and literature are methods we have for dealing with complexities."
Finally, "South Asian immigrant fiction, memoir and cookbooks, all of them contributors to the curry book genre, are often deeply marked by nostalgia, by a drive for discovering the authenticity left behind in another time and place."
I grew up in the U.K. where we followed the same pattern of meals each week. My mother prepared roast meat on Sunday, served slices of the meat cold on Monday, and then, curried the leftovers on Tuesday. Curry is part of the fabric of British life. In 2013, I was surprised and delighted to learn that fish and chips was no longer the national dish of Britain, it was now curry!
Growing up the U.K. we had a plethora of Indian restaurants, every town seemed to have one, and I assumed America would be similar. Imagine my astonishment to discover the opposite! There has been a distinct lack of an Indian restaurant in each town where I have lived since coming to America in 1990, and it is only within the past two years that an Indian restaurant opened nearby to where I live in the NW suburbs of Chicago.
My family loves curry and we have curry cookbooks that my sons brought back from their trip to India, which we continue to use to make dishes such as Paneer Jalfrezi and Paneer Makhani. Author Naben Ruthnum made me laugh out loud in Part 1 when he wrote self-deprecatingly that "Shelina Permalloo, a fellow first-generation child of Mauritians (but born in the U.K. and destined to be winner of the 2012 season of Masterchef, while I am a Canadian who can cook seven things pretty well)."
Ruthnum's writing style and tone is truly engaging and in Part 2: Reading - when Ruthnum asked "What is it that is exactly the same about every single vacation you have taken?" I immediately started to puzzle out the answer. Then, Ruthnum surprised and delighted me with his answer, which may be obvious to everyone else, "You, you're the same, no matter where you go there you are."
In part Part 3: Race - Ruthnum refers back to his years growing up brown in Canada. He writes, "The ways to not-belong as a brown teenager in white small-town Canada are even more complex than my Beavis haircut and Black Sabbath T-shirt could express in 1996. If Indian is a baggy term, South Asian is parachute pants."
Then regarding immigrants who have settled in America, "The elements that they miss they can go back for or simply feel nostalgic for. What would have been missed by not leaving is their lives, the substance of their careers, the families they made, their existence itself."
He goes on to write that "the success stories complicate feelings of longing for the past in a different land. But that's fine, stories and literature are methods we have for dealing with complexities."
Finally, "South Asian immigrant fiction, memoir and cookbooks, all of them contributors to the curry book genre, are often deeply marked by nostalgia, by a drive for discovering the authenticity left behind in another time and place."
August 24, 2017
I enjoyed this extended essay that looks at curry as a cultural signifier. Curry is Ruthnum’s starting point for a rumination on race and representation in pop culture and literature. To use an analogy that will no doubt drive Ruthnum crazy, his prose has just the right amount of fiery wit, spicy humour, and heat.
Particularly sharp is the discussion about what Ruthnum calls “currybooks”, or what others have called mangobooks, or sari-and-spice books. You know the covers: colourful sari borders, mangoes, spices, and maybe the top of a woman’s lovely head of glistening black hair, or a close-up of one artfully kohl-lined eye. The stories might be complex and interesting, or they might be typical diaspora narratives by brown authors that traffic in nostalgia and stereotypes, where the pure, dirty and colourful and backward East is contrasted with the spiritually-corrupt, pristine, cool and monochrome yet progressive West.
“The popularity of these narratives,” Ruthnum explains, “and the relationships that diasporic writers have with the as both authors and readers, are part of another tangled story we tell each other and ourselves, wondering ultimately if they are something that white Westerners are interested in for reasons that would make us uncomfortable”.
Ruthnum is interested in how brown people in the West produce and circulate exoticism of their own culture, either because it’s marketable or because they have bought into the stereotypical narratives that claim the “home country” as the place of one’s essential roots and authenticity. But as any immigrant in the West who’s been on the receiving end of the racist “Go back to ________” knows, there is danger in the nostalgia for cultural purity and the assertion that some people have to go back “home” (i.e. they have to get out of where there are now) to become fully human or to be understood or to find commonality with others.
He writes about Pasha Malla, an author I haven’t read and now want to:
“Malla’s previous work successfully evaded addressing the clichés: in the story collection and novel preceeding Fugue States, Malla had sidestepped the curry game completely, delivering closely observed and sometimes surreal character-based stories that had little to do with his racial or cultural origin.”
I take Ruthnum’s point but I also wonder if it’s ever possible to write something that has “little to do with [one’s] racial or cultural origin”. Even in a piece of writing that is expressly not about race or culture or identity, a writer’s background informs the perspective, the worldview, of the story. It’s something I think about a lot in relation to what’s celebrated as experimental or avant-garde writing: it’s very white. If a brown woman wrote like Fleur Jaeggy or Clarice Lispector, would she even have the space and support to nurture her work? Would she even be published if she’s not writing a sprawling inter-generational family saga or something that doesn’t overtly allude to the “immigrant experience” or the “clash” between cultures?
Elsewhere, Ruthnum talks about Bend It Like Beckham, saying that the film is a “shallow parade of annoying stereotypes of older-generation South Asian stiffness and their grudgingly dutiful, big-dreamin’ children”. While I love the film, I also recognise his statement as true, and I’ve always avoided thinking too much about it because I know it will complicate my very (simple) love for the cheesy feel-good vibes when I watch it. As he points out, “the film’s power isn’t in how fresh and South Asian it is, but in how familiar and Western it is”. He understands that he isn’t the target audience of Gurinder Chadha’s film, which is probably beloved to many brown girls everywhere, but he also considers a film that made him feel seen in the same light: “[Bend It Like Beckham] shares this with Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle: both films are mainstreaming narratives, stories that don’t efface the unique effects of diasporic experience, but do concentrate on just how Western brown people in the West can be”.
Curry isn’t a long read, but it’s a dense, sharp little read that asks hard questions. I’ll just end this with a whole slew of quotes from the book:
“Being second-gen made me counterfeit Mauritian back in my old country, and I continued to ring false to South Asians who were more closely aligned with India, Pakistan, Bangladesh－the core that we scattered from […] If Indian is a baggy term, South Asian is parachute pants.”
“Shouldn’t approaching pain, alienation, displacement, and a sense of cultural unbelonging come from a place of incomprehension, not a predetermined inquiry that holds that the East has answers to the dissatisfactions of a life in the West? I’m not telling you, I’m asking. But it’s a pointed ask.”
“As brown people in the West, our stories don’t have to explain ourselves to white people, or to each other－they don’t have to explain shit.”
Particularly sharp is the discussion about what Ruthnum calls “currybooks”, or what others have called mangobooks, or sari-and-spice books. You know the covers: colourful sari borders, mangoes, spices, and maybe the top of a woman’s lovely head of glistening black hair, or a close-up of one artfully kohl-lined eye. The stories might be complex and interesting, or they might be typical diaspora narratives by brown authors that traffic in nostalgia and stereotypes, where the pure, dirty and colourful and backward East is contrasted with the spiritually-corrupt, pristine, cool and monochrome yet progressive West.
“The popularity of these narratives,” Ruthnum explains, “and the relationships that diasporic writers have with the as both authors and readers, are part of another tangled story we tell each other and ourselves, wondering ultimately if they are something that white Westerners are interested in for reasons that would make us uncomfortable”.
Ruthnum is interested in how brown people in the West produce and circulate exoticism of their own culture, either because it’s marketable or because they have bought into the stereotypical narratives that claim the “home country” as the place of one’s essential roots and authenticity. But as any immigrant in the West who’s been on the receiving end of the racist “Go back to ________” knows, there is danger in the nostalgia for cultural purity and the assertion that some people have to go back “home” (i.e. they have to get out of where there are now) to become fully human or to be understood or to find commonality with others.
He writes about Pasha Malla, an author I haven’t read and now want to:
“Malla’s previous work successfully evaded addressing the clichés: in the story collection and novel preceeding Fugue States, Malla had sidestepped the curry game completely, delivering closely observed and sometimes surreal character-based stories that had little to do with his racial or cultural origin.”
I take Ruthnum’s point but I also wonder if it’s ever possible to write something that has “little to do with [one’s] racial or cultural origin”. Even in a piece of writing that is expressly not about race or culture or identity, a writer’s background informs the perspective, the worldview, of the story. It’s something I think about a lot in relation to what’s celebrated as experimental or avant-garde writing: it’s very white. If a brown woman wrote like Fleur Jaeggy or Clarice Lispector, would she even have the space and support to nurture her work? Would she even be published if she’s not writing a sprawling inter-generational family saga or something that doesn’t overtly allude to the “immigrant experience” or the “clash” between cultures?
Elsewhere, Ruthnum talks about Bend It Like Beckham, saying that the film is a “shallow parade of annoying stereotypes of older-generation South Asian stiffness and their grudgingly dutiful, big-dreamin’ children”. While I love the film, I also recognise his statement as true, and I’ve always avoided thinking too much about it because I know it will complicate my very (simple) love for the cheesy feel-good vibes when I watch it. As he points out, “the film’s power isn’t in how fresh and South Asian it is, but in how familiar and Western it is”. He understands that he isn’t the target audience of Gurinder Chadha’s film, which is probably beloved to many brown girls everywhere, but he also considers a film that made him feel seen in the same light: “[Bend It Like Beckham] shares this with Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle: both films are mainstreaming narratives, stories that don’t efface the unique effects of diasporic experience, but do concentrate on just how Western brown people in the West can be”.
Curry isn’t a long read, but it’s a dense, sharp little read that asks hard questions. I’ll just end this with a whole slew of quotes from the book:
“Being second-gen made me counterfeit Mauritian back in my old country, and I continued to ring false to South Asians who were more closely aligned with India, Pakistan, Bangladesh－the core that we scattered from […] If Indian is a baggy term, South Asian is parachute pants.”
“Shouldn’t approaching pain, alienation, displacement, and a sense of cultural unbelonging come from a place of incomprehension, not a predetermined inquiry that holds that the East has answers to the dissatisfactions of a life in the West? I’m not telling you, I’m asking. But it’s a pointed ask.”
“As brown people in the West, our stories don’t have to explain ourselves to white people, or to each other－they don’t have to explain shit.”
October 16, 2018
"The cycling story of diaspora, of human movement across great spaces, constant dislocation and relation, is present in mouthfuls of this dish: curry's reassuring power isn't a resurrection of a stable past, but a reminder that the past, and our former countries, are as fractious and adaptable as the present."
In 144 pages, Ruthnum crafts a strong food memoir, cultural criticism, and literary review. The larger theme of curry relates to his Indian cultural background, but he never lived on the Indian subcontinent, instead born in Mauritius, a small Indian Ocean island, and then moving to Canada later in his youth. Ruthnum traces this diasporic link to curry, the quintessential Indian food, and then moves into a critical look at other writers and public figures of South Asian descent. The majority of the book is reserved for an analysis of "currybooks" as he terms them:
"This thread of diasporic literature become a subgenre unto itself, and it's now a sure thing that you'll find a disconnected-family/roots-discovery page-turner with exotic red silks, black braided hair, and perhaps a mango on the cover along the stacked books at Costco..."
He delves into specific books - nearly 20 or 30 titles all gathered in a Works Cited addendeum at the end. Some I was familiar with (Jhumpa Lahiri, Monica Ali, and many others), others were new, but I recognize the genre and what Ruthnum calls the nostaligic look at the home country. He brings in some other cultural highlights too - television and films to continue the point.
After reading this treatise on South Asian diaspora, Ruthnum shares in the Coda about his decision to use a pseudonym, Nathan Ripley, to write thriller titles. It was an intriguing addition to this book about identity to include this at the end. I like when writers showcase their wide range in this way, and I enjoyed exploring more through Ruthnum's essays.
In 144 pages, Ruthnum crafts a strong food memoir, cultural criticism, and literary review. The larger theme of curry relates to his Indian cultural background, but he never lived on the Indian subcontinent, instead born in Mauritius, a small Indian Ocean island, and then moving to Canada later in his youth. Ruthnum traces this diasporic link to curry, the quintessential Indian food, and then moves into a critical look at other writers and public figures of South Asian descent. The majority of the book is reserved for an analysis of "currybooks" as he terms them:
"This thread of diasporic literature become a subgenre unto itself, and it's now a sure thing that you'll find a disconnected-family/roots-discovery page-turner with exotic red silks, black braided hair, and perhaps a mango on the cover along the stacked books at Costco..."
He delves into specific books - nearly 20 or 30 titles all gathered in a Works Cited addendeum at the end. Some I was familiar with (Jhumpa Lahiri, Monica Ali, and many others), others were new, but I recognize the genre and what Ruthnum calls the nostaligic look at the home country. He brings in some other cultural highlights too - television and films to continue the point.
After reading this treatise on South Asian diaspora, Ruthnum shares in the Coda about his decision to use a pseudonym, Nathan Ripley, to write thriller titles. It was an intriguing addition to this book about identity to include this at the end. I like when writers showcase their wide range in this way, and I enjoyed exploring more through Ruthnum's essays.
December 21, 2020
This is a book I think I will have to revisit, as it covers a lot of different things, but mostly about the trap writers of the Asian diaspora often find themselves in if they want to be published and successful: create a "curry" book, a narrative of soft, fuzzy nostalgia for a past, whether in India, Pakistan, or some other country, and where one can find truth, a deeper identity for the writer, and a place on the map where Western audiences can identify easily and that matches their preconceived notions of the place. That's not to say that nostalgia is bad, but the "curry" book doesn't take into account the many, many differences those of us in the Asian diaspora actually have amongst ourselves, such as the languages, religions, ethnic group, and even this awful construct: caste, and all the others attributes. Also, by virtue of living outside of one’s ancestral land, the curry book also diminishes or hides the fact that 1st and 2nd generation immigrants will gradually have more in common with their Westernized audience, than other members of the diaspora.
That's not to say either that the stereotypes of nosy aunties, disapproving parents and their rigid expectations for their progeny’s employment choices and self-expression aren't based in reality (I knew plenty of nosy aunties!), but Naben Ruthnum feels Asian diasporic writers should not be consigned to writing narratives rife with stereotypes so that their publishers and readers can feel superior and complacent with the "brown others" who share their spaces.
I've read some "curry" books, but I've also read narratives that, though they may have employed some of the stereotypes, were so much more. And I think the author is saying that he feels a writer of the Asian diaspora should be able to write and publish complex, rich narratives not steeped in an artificial nostalgia, and these works should be able to find an audience looking for something more than the tired tropes of what an Asian is.
That's not to say either that the stereotypes of nosy aunties, disapproving parents and their rigid expectations for their progeny’s employment choices and self-expression aren't based in reality (I knew plenty of nosy aunties!), but Naben Ruthnum feels Asian diasporic writers should not be consigned to writing narratives rife with stereotypes so that their publishers and readers can feel superior and complacent with the "brown others" who share their spaces.
I've read some "curry" books, but I've also read narratives that, though they may have employed some of the stereotypes, were so much more. And I think the author is saying that he feels a writer of the Asian diaspora should be able to write and publish complex, rich narratives not steeped in an artificial nostalgia, and these works should be able to find an audience looking for something more than the tired tropes of what an Asian is.
August 21, 2017
Thank you to NetGalley and Coach House Books for providing me with a free copy in exchange for an honest review.
This title is part of Coach House's Exploded Views series that aims at looking at most current social and cultural issues from politics, to art, to class, race, and everything in between. Curry is a heartfelt, emotionally engaging collection of essays on what it feels like to be a "brown person" in the West. Ruthnum uses such a broad term to categorize his own culture to reflect how the Western audience tends to clamp together multiple nationalities, very much like any saucy, fragrant rice dish is categorized as curry. He discusses the literature by South Asian authors that is often plagued by the tropes of exoticism, alienation, and nostalgia that seem to be the only elements publishers seek out in writers like himself. The "currybooks", as he calls them. Ruthnum also writes about his own fears of falling into this trap, and what it means to him and his cultural identity. Each essay is an eye-opener and provides multiple arguments to chew on.
It's interesting that while Ruthnum is speaking on behalf of this very specific demographic, I find myself relating a lot as a daughter of immigrants of Eastern European heritage. When he speaks about being a peg forced into a Western-shaped hole with all the accompanying stereotypes, I see myself nod. When he describes his frustration with the endless silks, mangoes, spices, and grains of rice on the covers of South Asian lit, I remember my own gripes with garish red, blocky, pseudo-Cyrillic lettering, onion domes, and ever present matryoshka. It seems that Western audiences crave the stories they consider exotic, yet insist on them being comfortably familiar, shaped according to their own understanding of our foreign-ness. It is incredible how much I can relate to this book!
Anyone who likes to question the to understand the world from multiple perspectives should read this book. It will teach you a thing or two.
This title is part of Coach House's Exploded Views series that aims at looking at most current social and cultural issues from politics, to art, to class, race, and everything in between. Curry is a heartfelt, emotionally engaging collection of essays on what it feels like to be a "brown person" in the West. Ruthnum uses such a broad term to categorize his own culture to reflect how the Western audience tends to clamp together multiple nationalities, very much like any saucy, fragrant rice dish is categorized as curry. He discusses the literature by South Asian authors that is often plagued by the tropes of exoticism, alienation, and nostalgia that seem to be the only elements publishers seek out in writers like himself. The "currybooks", as he calls them. Ruthnum also writes about his own fears of falling into this trap, and what it means to him and his cultural identity. Each essay is an eye-opener and provides multiple arguments to chew on.
It's interesting that while Ruthnum is speaking on behalf of this very specific demographic, I find myself relating a lot as a daughter of immigrants of Eastern European heritage. When he speaks about being a peg forced into a Western-shaped hole with all the accompanying stereotypes, I see myself nod. When he describes his frustration with the endless silks, mangoes, spices, and grains of rice on the covers of South Asian lit, I remember my own gripes with garish red, blocky, pseudo-Cyrillic lettering, onion domes, and ever present matryoshka. It seems that Western audiences crave the stories they consider exotic, yet insist on them being comfortably familiar, shaped according to their own understanding of our foreign-ness. It is incredible how much I can relate to this book!
Anyone who likes to question the to understand the world from multiple perspectives should read this book. It will teach you a thing or two.
February 25, 2020
A wide-ranging essay on the South Asian immigrant experience that feels a little stretched into book-length format. The curry and food concept is quickly abandoned for a wider-ranging meditation on literature and culture, name-dropping and criticizing the famous interpreters of Indian culture for Western audiences, albeit with subtlety and some admiration for those who do it well.
Written for a popular audience, it's more critique than restorative, and never feels particularly dug deep. But its arguments are valid, if amorphously flowing, and you can absorb it in an afternoon.
Written for a popular audience, it's more critique than restorative, and never feels particularly dug deep. But its arguments are valid, if amorphously flowing, and you can absorb it in an afternoon.
May 4, 2020
Book blurb: By grappling with novels, recipes, travelogues, pop culture, and his own upbringing, Naben Ruthnum depicts how the distinctive taste of curry has often become maladroit shorthand for brown identity.
May is Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month in the States, and this was my first read for the Asian Readathon that runs all month long.
This book is a collection of three essays that explores the themes of eating, reading, and race in the South Asian diaspora from an insider looking around, as well as from an non-SA gaze looking in. His exploration of "curry books" had me smiling throughout. Yes! I'm not interested in reading books by SA authors written for a non-SA audience either. I know they are much loved, but they tend to annoy me, and I always look to see what other SAs have to say about them before I bother picking one up. Maybe people of all cultures feel this way, but this is not something I've heard discussed much other than in an Own Voices context (and the recent controversy around American Dirt). I really enjoyed this short collection. I found myself nodding along, it gave me lots to ponder, and I was hungry throughout.
I listened to the audiobook, which was narrated by Matthew Edison, and I would not recommend this on audio. It's not that he's a bad narrator, but he stumbled over names of curry and people, and that kept pulling me out of the flow of what I was hearing. I highly recommend this to anyone interested in the themes, but skip the audio format.
May is Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month in the States, and this was my first read for the Asian Readathon that runs all month long.
This book is a collection of three essays that explores the themes of eating, reading, and race in the South Asian diaspora from an insider looking around, as well as from an non-SA gaze looking in. His exploration of "curry books" had me smiling throughout. Yes! I'm not interested in reading books by SA authors written for a non-SA audience either. I know they are much loved, but they tend to annoy me, and I always look to see what other SAs have to say about them before I bother picking one up. Maybe people of all cultures feel this way, but this is not something I've heard discussed much other than in an Own Voices context (and the recent controversy around American Dirt). I really enjoyed this short collection. I found myself nodding along, it gave me lots to ponder, and I was hungry throughout.
I listened to the audiobook, which was narrated by Matthew Edison, and I would not recommend this on audio. It's not that he's a bad narrator, but he stumbled over names of curry and people, and that kept pulling me out of the flow of what I was hearing. I highly recommend this to anyone interested in the themes, but skip the audio format.
January 29, 2018
I simultaneously wanted more and less of this book. More because it was smart and did an amazing job of weaving together so much material while remaining coherent and still saying something, but less because I feel like the book really should've had a heavier hand at editing. A good deal of over-reiteration, especially in the first half. That said, in writing this I'm thinking about the length of the book - it's already only 110 pages with a lot of block quotes. I feel like it would've been better at 80, but where does it go then as far as publication? Would I have heard about this work if it were only 80 pages? My instinct is to say that it could've been a section of a larger work, but is that a fair expectation just because of the length? I don't think so, but the reality is that I think it's both true that this would've been a higher quality work if it were much shorter and that I probably would not have encountered the work if it had been much shorter. Which is disconcerting.
Anyways, long story short, you should read this.
Anyways, long story short, you should read this.
August 11, 2017
This book was a captivating exploration of food, literature, and identity from the perspective of the South Asian diaspora! I look forward to reading this talented author's upcoming debut novel.
May 3, 2018
I read this after enjoying an excerpt in The Paris Review: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2...
There are three essays here, Eating, Reading, and Race, and I might have done better to space them out (if I hadn’t had to get the book back to the library) because there’s some repetition. Ruthnum explores the way a standard definition of “authenticity” limits representations of and writing by brown people (his focus is mostly on fellow South Asians though the ideas could apply more broadly), who are expected to produce nostalgic, trope-y “currybooks,” stories of finding your authentic self through a return to the homeland/learning to cook your mother’s way, for both white Western audiences and perhaps fellow members of the diaspora.
Most interesting is his challenge to ideas of a stable “authenticity.” Curry, he points out, is always already a product of empire and cultural mixture—chilies, for example, were brought to India by the Portuguese. And the blanket term “South Asian,” though useful in some ways, elides historical and present conflicts and differences between members of this group. Some currybooks are shallow and trope-ridden, others are good. And while the popularity of certain tropes can erase other stories, they are also true to many people’s lives. Ruthnum’s own book has a recipe for one of his mother’s curries and an account of his one childhood trip to his parents’ homeland, Mauritius (he’s more than one remove from India, and I wondered how that influenced his desire to challenge what is “authentic”).
Ruthnum writes of how he’s most at home in diverse cities where he can pass unnoticed, normal. When I first started reading this, I looked him up and discovered he is also thriller writer Nathan Ripley, and I wondered how the choice of an Anglo penname might support his argument about what brown people are allowed to write (and also whether this represented an unsuccessful challenge to those “rules”). That’s something he addresses, to some extent, in the Coda, where he argues that writing a thriller feels freeing because readers want to be surprised, want an author to twist the tropes. Which is true, I guess, but it also comes with rules and expectations, like any genre. But that kind of complexity and nuance is acknowledged in this thoughtful book, which I really enjoyed. (I didn’t even mention his thoughts on Harold and Kumar or Bend it Like Beckham!).
There are three essays here, Eating, Reading, and Race, and I might have done better to space them out (if I hadn’t had to get the book back to the library) because there’s some repetition. Ruthnum explores the way a standard definition of “authenticity” limits representations of and writing by brown people (his focus is mostly on fellow South Asians though the ideas could apply more broadly), who are expected to produce nostalgic, trope-y “currybooks,” stories of finding your authentic self through a return to the homeland/learning to cook your mother’s way, for both white Western audiences and perhaps fellow members of the diaspora.
Most interesting is his challenge to ideas of a stable “authenticity.” Curry, he points out, is always already a product of empire and cultural mixture—chilies, for example, were brought to India by the Portuguese. And the blanket term “South Asian,” though useful in some ways, elides historical and present conflicts and differences between members of this group. Some currybooks are shallow and trope-ridden, others are good. And while the popularity of certain tropes can erase other stories, they are also true to many people’s lives. Ruthnum’s own book has a recipe for one of his mother’s curries and an account of his one childhood trip to his parents’ homeland, Mauritius (he’s more than one remove from India, and I wondered how that influenced his desire to challenge what is “authentic”).
Ruthnum writes of how he’s most at home in diverse cities where he can pass unnoticed, normal. When I first started reading this, I looked him up and discovered he is also thriller writer Nathan Ripley, and I wondered how the choice of an Anglo penname might support his argument about what brown people are allowed to write (and also whether this represented an unsuccessful challenge to those “rules”). That’s something he addresses, to some extent, in the Coda, where he argues that writing a thriller feels freeing because readers want to be surprised, want an author to twist the tropes. Which is true, I guess, but it also comes with rules and expectations, like any genre. But that kind of complexity and nuance is acknowledged in this thoughtful book, which I really enjoyed. (I didn’t even mention his thoughts on Harold and Kumar or Bend it Like Beckham!).
November 28, 2020
This was an irritating read: too long, lacking structure and a point, the self-indulgent meanderings of the author. Upon completion I could not tell you answers to basic questions about this text: who is the intended audience? What question is it answering? What can folks learn from it?
The author appear to be tilting at a straw man: an idea of curry and curry books that does not really exist. He never actually defines a curry book or provides a single example of one, I guess we will just know them when we see them. Who actually thinks a curry is a singular, immutable dish? Who does not know that tomatoes and chillies are New World crops, so cannot have been part of Indian cuisine prior to 1500. But more importantly, does it even matter?
More damning still, the text does not push any of its arguments far enough. The desperate search for authenticity, among both white and brown folks in West, derives from the all that is solid melts into air nature of capitalist modernity, creating deep anxieties in its subjects who are uncomfortable with a social order and social relations that can shift so quickly under their feet. The modern nation state, based on Judeo Christian archetypes of the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth recreating the lost Garden of Eden, creates a national myth of a pristine past needing to be reclaimed and preserved from the predations of a corrupt present social order. This myth is false and homogenizes the different peoples in the past and codifies a specific social order to the advantage of some and disadvantage of others. Nostalgia and the quest for authenticity is dangerous because if feeds into these false narratives and reifies existing power structures.
But at the same time, all utopian political projects (progressive ones too) require the creation of new identities with new shared narratives; these too will be false. The issue isn’t their falsity, but the political purpose the narrative is put too. So, then, is the South Asian diasporic identity ostensibly being created by these curry books so bad? Is their politics revanchist? I doubt so, but cannot know because we never learn of a single curry book that we can interrogate.
The author appear to be tilting at a straw man: an idea of curry and curry books that does not really exist. He never actually defines a curry book or provides a single example of one, I guess we will just know them when we see them. Who actually thinks a curry is a singular, immutable dish? Who does not know that tomatoes and chillies are New World crops, so cannot have been part of Indian cuisine prior to 1500. But more importantly, does it even matter?
More damning still, the text does not push any of its arguments far enough. The desperate search for authenticity, among both white and brown folks in West, derives from the all that is solid melts into air nature of capitalist modernity, creating deep anxieties in its subjects who are uncomfortable with a social order and social relations that can shift so quickly under their feet. The modern nation state, based on Judeo Christian archetypes of the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth recreating the lost Garden of Eden, creates a national myth of a pristine past needing to be reclaimed and preserved from the predations of a corrupt present social order. This myth is false and homogenizes the different peoples in the past and codifies a specific social order to the advantage of some and disadvantage of others. Nostalgia and the quest for authenticity is dangerous because if feeds into these false narratives and reifies existing power structures.
But at the same time, all utopian political projects (progressive ones too) require the creation of new identities with new shared narratives; these too will be false. The issue isn’t their falsity, but the political purpose the narrative is put too. So, then, is the South Asian diasporic identity ostensibly being created by these curry books so bad? Is their politics revanchist? I doubt so, but cannot know because we never learn of a single curry book that we can interrogate.
November 6, 2017
A deep and thoughtful look at what Ruthnum calls "currybooks", or books of the South Asian diaspora. Curry has adapted to the many parts of the world it has been brought to, with spices and cream added and subtracted to cater to the tastes of a particular people. Likewise, currybooks charge form based on different factors but have nostalgia, authenticity, and the idea of getting back to one's roots as overarching themes.
Ruthnum examines novels, cookbooks, movies, and touches on his own experience as the son of Mauritian immigrants. The writing is well-done and interesting, falling more on the educational side of things than entertaining. There's nothing wrong with that, but go in knowing that Curry will require (and reward) your mental effort. My e-copy is full of highlights that I suspect I'll be returning to as I read more books set in and by authors from this part of the world.
Great for those interested in representation, the immigrant experience, race, and how they're expressed in literature.
Thanks to Coach House Books and Edelweiss for providing a review copy.
Is there a problem with these expectations in the genre? Only that they constrain and limit the potential methods of expression for brown writers.
Ruthnum examines novels, cookbooks, movies, and touches on his own experience as the son of Mauritian immigrants. The writing is well-done and interesting, falling more on the educational side of things than entertaining. There's nothing wrong with that, but go in knowing that Curry will require (and reward) your mental effort. My e-copy is full of highlights that I suspect I'll be returning to as I read more books set in and by authors from this part of the world.
Great for those interested in representation, the immigrant experience, race, and how they're expressed in literature.
Thanks to Coach House Books and Edelweiss for providing a review copy.
Read
May 14, 2018‘Drawing parallels between food and literature, Ruthnum writes incisively about the danger of letting a singular narrative abound when it’s a narrative that creates stereotypes and feeds tired notions of what it means to be part of the Indian diaspora…But by playing the messy notions of what a curry is or isn’t, Ruthnum has penned his own currybook, albeit one that tells the story of what it means to be a brown person on his own terms without pandering to external preconceptions of what South Asian writing should be.’
Big Issue
‘In Curry: Eating, Reading and Race, Ruthnum has written a curry book—the word ‘curry’ certainly appears more times than one could count—but it’s one where he explores what it means to be a brown person on his own terms. It’s not a brown nostalgia tale. There are no mangoes. There are no scattered cardamom seeds…By defying what ingredients he’s expected to put into his curries, what he’s expected to read and what he should write about, Ruthnum issues to other brown writers a call to arms to break out of the box that the west insists on putting them in.’
Lifted Brow
Big Issue
‘In Curry: Eating, Reading and Race, Ruthnum has written a curry book—the word ‘curry’ certainly appears more times than one could count—but it’s one where he explores what it means to be a brown person on his own terms. It’s not a brown nostalgia tale. There are no mangoes. There are no scattered cardamom seeds…By defying what ingredients he’s expected to put into his curries, what he’s expected to read and what he should write about, Ruthnum issues to other brown writers a call to arms to break out of the box that the west insists on putting them in.’
Lifted Brow
September 19, 2017
I wanted to enjoy this book more than I did. However, the book turned out to be more educational than enjoyable. It was a series of essays about the depiction of disaporic South Asians in books and pop culture. It was quite eye opening, with some really great quotes in here. It felt like I was reading a sociology textbook at times, which is not a bad thing.
Recommend it for anyone who loves reading about books and representation.
Recommend it for anyone who loves reading about books and representation.
August 19, 2017
Loved it. Naben speaks candidly about race, writing and of course food. There is some "serious" humour included as well.
November 26, 2019
This was incredibly smart, deftly observed and also slyly funny in a way that made me audibly yell. Can’t wait to re-read.
April 10, 2020
This book CALLED ME OUT hahaha. But I learned a lot of valuable lessons about writing as a south Asian. However, the fact that this was clearly narrated by a white man really took me out of the mood. Dude could not pronounce 'paratha'. Additionally, each essay seemed to meander a bit from topic to topic, though I enjoyed the diversions.
September 21, 2018
Ruthnum's essay is an examination of South Asian identity that's told through the lenses of curry and immigrant fiction. He talks about how curry doesn't actually exist as a singular thing and about how South Asian writing becomes unauthenticated by "imagined homelands" seen through a veil of nostalgia and the use of tropes. He talks about how South Asian people are represented in the media (The Simpsons, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, Master of None, The Mindy Project). And he talks about how publishers and readers are uninterested in books produced by South Asians that are anything other than the immigrant fiction described above, which Ruthnum calls "curry books."
Some of my favourite books would be classified under immigrant or cultural fiction. Maybe because I like learning about other cultures, maybe because I relate to the immigrant experience. Obviously I don't draw any parallels from my experience to that of people fleeing persecution or poverty, but rather the idea of an 'imagined homeland' or imagined alternative self. There's a quote in The Wangs vs. the World that explains this perfectly:
"Every immigrant is the person he might have been and the person he is, and the homeland is at once the place it would have been to him from the inside and the place it must be to him from the outside."
Is any immigrant able to accurately portray the homeland they're no longer fully immersed in? Especially when we know that our memories are fallible...
Ruthnum's essay really made me think about why I like immigrant/cultural fiction. Where before I thought they were untouchable, now I consider whether the ones I've read and enjoyed are authentic. Is there truth in this representation? How does each book contribute to South Asian identity?
Ruthnum also made me think about how South Asian people are often blanketed under a single set of stereotypes or characteristics. We don't always take the time to learn the various nuances or experiences (the differences between Indians and Malaysians, for example). I love the quote he included by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”
Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race was a very thought-provoking read.
Some of my favourite books would be classified under immigrant or cultural fiction. Maybe because I like learning about other cultures, maybe because I relate to the immigrant experience. Obviously I don't draw any parallels from my experience to that of people fleeing persecution or poverty, but rather the idea of an 'imagined homeland' or imagined alternative self. There's a quote in The Wangs vs. the World that explains this perfectly:
"Every immigrant is the person he might have been and the person he is, and the homeland is at once the place it would have been to him from the inside and the place it must be to him from the outside."
Is any immigrant able to accurately portray the homeland they're no longer fully immersed in? Especially when we know that our memories are fallible...
Ruthnum's essay really made me think about why I like immigrant/cultural fiction. Where before I thought they were untouchable, now I consider whether the ones I've read and enjoyed are authentic. Is there truth in this representation? How does each book contribute to South Asian identity?
Ruthnum also made me think about how South Asian people are often blanketed under a single set of stereotypes or characteristics. We don't always take the time to learn the various nuances or experiences (the differences between Indians and Malaysians, for example). I love the quote he included by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”
Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race was a very thought-provoking read.
November 2, 2022
I thought this was interesting! Personally more relatable to my experience with West Asian/Mediterranean food than with East Asian, and more relatable to East Asian diaspora books I've read than West Asian ones.
Tbh in both content and form it kind of reads like an essay for an undergrad lit class. Which isn't to say it's bad, but just like fairly shallow and not wildly good.
Also the narrator's fake British accent when he quotes ppl is weird ngl
Tbh in both content and form it kind of reads like an essay for an undergrad lit class. Which isn't to say it's bad, but just like fairly shallow and not wildly good.
Also the narrator's fake British accent when he quotes ppl is weird ngl
July 18, 2017
I wasn't sure what to make of this essay, but I'm pretty sure I enjoyed reading it -- but not more than enjoying curry; in it's many forms defined by the author. I hadn't been aware of how curry can be perceived in various cultures, and it was fairly eye-opening. I hadn't even known of the Mauritius Island off the coast of Africa; overall, I learned quite a bit from "Curry".
October 23, 2019
A very long essay on the history and future of the "curry" book. Naben fights with his own conscience throughout this book, as he tries to describe what it is like to be a writer with brown skin. Is it wrong to write a "curry" book? Is it pandering to write what the masses want to read, or do you hold yourself to a "higher" ideal and write anything but books about "Indian" culture?
October 29, 2019
Recommended reading for anyone reviewing books and for anyone teaching what goes inside books. There's a kind of manifesto in these pages, and it's that marginalized authors should have support to write more than just the stories of their marginalization. Just as non-marginalized have had support to write outside their experience since publishing immemorial, so too should marginalized authors.
July 15, 2018
Really sharp insights and arguments about the importance of particularity and familiarity in fiction, especially as it relates to stories of immigration, dislocation and race. And it's all delivered in a voice that is precise, deprecating, and subtly hilarious. Highly recommended.
July 25, 2023
This book has an interesting concept and makes some very valid points regarding the South Asian diaspora (points which, incidentally, apply in varying degrees to all diasporas). However, I was more interested in what Ruthnum had to say about curry and how it changed than the state of diaspora media six years ago. I enjoyed the first section—"eating"—more than the following two—"reading" and "race." Perhaps part of that is because I am part of the Asian diaspora myself, and so I already have internalized a lot of what he discusses in the "race" section? Or perhaps because we as a bookish community are trying already to normalize the wider diversity in fiction that he dreams about in the "reading" section. We may not have reached the ideal state of diverse media yet, but we have made big improvements in the past few years that were not evident in 2017 when this was written.
I do recommend reading this, especially for white readers who want to better understand what members of brown communities experience when it comes to storytelling and representation. However, do keep in mind that it reads very much like an essay. I don't mind that in my non-fiction, but it's something to be aware of.
I do recommend reading this, especially for white readers who want to better understand what members of brown communities experience when it comes to storytelling and representation. However, do keep in mind that it reads very much like an essay. I don't mind that in my non-fiction, but it's something to be aware of.
Read
March 2, 2025DNF @pg 77 (Part 3: Race) - This was a well written essay but the repetition of the author's thesis is just draining my attention span. I found the beginning of the book really interesting but with each passing section, I become less and less excited to pick this up. The topics discussed here are interesting but there's an almost academic tone that I find a bit off-putting after a while.
January 15, 2021
Much more interesting than I anticipated. I think it was primarily interesting because I've been immersed in a couple Indian cookbooks lately and was familiar with at least 1/3 of the authors mentioned.
May 13, 2021
*Please seek out own voices reviews* I enjoyed this look at curry from the perspectives of "eating, reading and race". It opened my eyes to numerous things I was not aware of. Highly recommend if you love curry or cuisine connected to other cultures.
December 10, 2023
This is one of those books that manages to be both insightful and informative and also funny as hell. Ostensibly a deconstruction of "currybooks" (fiction and memoirs, beloved of white people book clubs, from the South Asian diaspora that often focus on food as a vehicle for exploring nostalgia), it complicates the relationship of second- and third-generation immigrants to homelands, cultures, and literature. Also contains a recipe that would sound pretty good if I ate shrimp.
August 25, 2022
I first met Naben at the Humber College Summer writing workshop when I was assigned to his group. I read this book because of that connection, not expecting it to reshape my thinking of being part of a diaspora of Indians who left their homeland to find a better life and gainful work. Naben's prose is dry and witty and left room for questions to surface about how I view my culture of origin and how I integrated with the Caribbean and Canadian culture. I'm glad I found this book and will pick it up again. Listening to the audiobook read by the author was very enjoyable and I definitely wanted to eat more curry because of all the curry talk.
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