The Cuttlefish

The Cuttlefish is a melodious stream-of-consciousness novel on the metaphysics of cooking, one woman's attempt to capture the unique ingredients of her elusive identity, and an intimate portrait of the influential people, places, and sublimated traumas in her life. With precision, candor, and delightfully subtle seduction, the narrator transports us into the ineluctable modalities of the aromatic and the gustatory, down secret pathways that lead to hidden emotions, dreams, and childhood memories.

Over the course of her creation of the delicacy, which she lovingly prepares for friends and a secret lover who will soon arrive at her home, the narrator-by turns nervous, sensual, and powerfully philosophical-revels in the audible and olfactory magic of cooking, ruminates on the combination and transmutation of the various ingredients, even extols the ethereal nature of white onions sautéing in olive oil.