My involvement with the foodie book group means I’ve always had an eye cocked for, well, food books. So how could I ignore this title—The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World’s Greatest Piece of Cheese? Between the fabulous cover design, testimonials (from Dave Eggers, Elizabeth Gilbert, Susan Orlean, George Saunders, and others), hand-drawn endpapers (it’s a map! a map! oh, I love a story that requires a map), and the fact that I’d read and loved author Michael Paterniti’s other book (Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein’s Brain), I had to have it.
Paterniti is a journalist; his stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Harper’s, Esquire, and GQ, for whom he works as a correspondent. And The Telling Room is as much about the work of journalism—about storytelling—as it is about a dramatic betrayal and cheese.
It’s true, as Paterniti says in an interview with NPR,
The telling room is, in Spanish, known as el contador. … In the northern part of the village is a hill, and into that hill were built these caves, some of them going back to Roman times, which would have been before the birth of Christ. And above those caves they would build a little room, so that a man could, or woman, could count the casks of wine and the cheeses, and everything from the harvest that went into the cave.
Over time, though, with refrigeration, the cave became less necessary, and so el contador took on this other meaning of “to tell a story,” and families would gather in their telling rooms, and they would talk about their dreams, and histories, and their secrets.
I read right past this in the early part of the story. Like Paterniti, I was completely taken in by the story of Ambrosio, the cheese he made from an old family recipe, and his best friend who stole it all right out from under him. Is there no justice in this world?
Perhaps not.
I bought this book for one reason and loved it for a completely different reason—for Paterniti’s meditation on the nature of truth and the power of story. He and his wife tell their children family stories—just as my parents repeated family stories to us kids—and wonder “if we were furthering certain inaccuracies inadvertently passed on to us, all harmless enough but meant in subtle ways to transfigure normal people caught up in events beyond their control into minor deities …” He goes on,
In this small exchange, our family kept each other alive and close. This is how we stitched the golden thread that connected the past and present, to make the collective coat we wore, how we passed along all the things that mattered most to us, and hoped to hold the world at bay for the moment it took to tell these stories, our heirlooms, for who knew what awaited beyond the locked doors of our night house, what other errant, whiskey-breathed story lurked out there in hopes of undoing ours?*
Like Edward Bloom in Daniel Wallace’s brilliant novel Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions, Ambrosio the cheesemaker is a master raconteur, telling his stories in his telling room as he sees them. Paterniti the journalist takes the role of William Bloom, Edward’s son, who grows up with the stories and, when he begins to hear with his adult ears, begins to question everything. Begins to write a different book, about the meaning of life, about family, about storytelling.
The Telling Room combines elements of travel writing and journalism with mythmaking. Is it a big fish tale? No, every part of it is true. 🙂
*And kids, if writing like this doesn’t make you weak with envy, I don’t know what will. I transcribed this from pages 322–323 of my first edition copy published by The Dial Press, © 2013.
Tweet: I loved this book for Paterniti’s meditation on the nature of truth & the power of story.
Tweet: The Telling Room is as much about the work of journalism—about storytelling—as it is about cheese.
Disclosure of Material Connection: I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the brands, products, or services that I have mentioned. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”