Hilarious. The narrator is a pompous twit through and through, that's what makes it great. Interspersed with recipes that get progressively more and more insane, and I think they all include a bit of mankind's most vile aperitif -- fernet branca.

After you've read too many lovely, wish-you-were-here travel memoirs & foodie books, Cooking with Fernet Branca is the amusing & biting antidote. I thoroughly enjoyed this parody & it had me literally laughing out loud at times. I'd give it 3.5 stars overall; I'll round it up to 4 stars because it made me laugh out loud when reading at Starbucks.

P.S. Don't read this book while eating... for two reasons.
1) You may choke on your food from laughing.
2) The included 'recipes' are revolting. LOL.

Two foreigners, Gerald & Marta, have bought neighboring houses in Italy, each hoping for a beautiful location that's peaceful. Gerald wants to concentrate on his career (ghostwriter of athlete autobiographies) & (heinous) cooking; Marta wants to concentrate on her career as a composer (currently working on a movie soundtrack for a famous Italian director). Both are rather put out to discover each other, since having a neighbor leads to all kinds of interruptions, misread intentions, noise, etc.... Here's a fun quote from early in the book after Gerald went to dinner at neighbor Marta's house:

"Things are looking good. Two days have now gone by since our dinner and nary a squeak out of Marta. I'm counting this as a culinary triumph: the ingenious use of food as an offensive weapon. Garlic ice cream with Fernet Branca may lack subtlety but it is highly effective and I feel that by giving you the recipe I have placed a pacifist's version of Clint Eastwood's famous .44 Magnum in your hands. "Make my evening, Marta," I might have said. And to my amazement she did, taking not one but three massive helpings. If I were a good neighbour I would have dropped in on her by now to make sure she is still alive. But I'm not, so I haven't."

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I had an hour alone at Starbucks today to start this book. (Ah, lovely!) Within a few minutes, I was sniggering so much that I actually snorted out loud. (This as I was trying so hard to keep my laughing to myself as I sat there alone -- you know, I didn't want to be tagged as the crazy lady at that table over there....) Oh well....

Obviously, so far, so good on this one!

I read this 13 years ago and still think of it with glee! It's an excellent book: fun, odd and strangely unforgettable. I borrowed it from the library where I used to play a game of 'judging a book by its cover' , in which I'd choose books purely by the front cover, nothing else. I found some good books this way but this was the best! Read it!

This is an odd one to judge: generally a pretty run-of-the-mill exercise, but with moments of real comic genius, in my view.

I should say that I don’t normally read comic novels (or intentionally comic novels), and reading this one rather reminded me why. There can be something hectoring about someone trying constantly to amuse you. I also have a very low tolerance of fart jokes.

I was driven to comedy in this instance partly for circumstantial reasons (as an antidote to miserable February weather and a miserable February workplace), but partly also because Cooking with Fernet Branca has got some very good reviews. I liked the prospect of a novel narrated by his-and-hers unreliable narrators, and the Italian setting was another lure for me (off-piste Italy, as well, high in the Apuan Alps behind Camaiore, north of Lucca.)

In the event, I found CWFB eminently forgettable—it’s already fading fast, although I only finished it a couple of days ago—to the extent that it seems rather strange to me that it managed to scrape its way on to the Booker longlist in 2004. Presumably it got there by virtue of its themes of art and commerce and compromise, levered rather clunkily into the novel through the professions of the odd-couple narrators, Marta and Gerald, who are, respectively, a composer of art-film music and a ghost writer for celebrities (or “amanuensis to knuckleheads,” in Gerald’s characteristically scathing phrase.)

What I liked best in CWFB were Gerald’s recipes, which are a splendid antic sub-genre in themselves. (I also liked Gerald’s invented Donizettian opera arias, mainly based on libretti found on the labels of DIY products: Non disperdere nell’ambiente; Nuoce gravemente alla salute.) Gerald’s culinary idiom is the crazed love-child of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s and Heston Blumenthal’s. It combines the finicky (one recipe calls for a single stamen of saffron) with the queasily red-in-tooth-and-claw (“Jack Russells are a bugger to bone.”) Alien Pie, with its smoked-cat base and “jaunty” buzzard-feather garnish, is surely Gerald’s masterpiece, but I also enjoyed such simple treats as Log Jam, made from steeped oak twigs (a technique “probably lost since the Late Bronze Age”)—not to mention the promising notion of constructing recipes on the basis of consonance (Moth Broth; Poodles and Noodles; Horse Sauce.)

As someone with the good fortune to be amorously paired with an ambitious cook (though happily not quite as ambitious as Gerald), I have picked up enough familiarity with the world of haute culinary fantasy that Hamilton-Paterson is parodying to have a sense of how well done this is. Pretentious cooking is an easy enough satirical target—everyone does it—but it’s not easy to do it this well.

Really clever and really funny. A complete delight.

I should have stuck with my gut and said "arrivederci" 50 pages in. This book was bloated and confusing, with a main character whom I kept hoping might walk off a cliff. Something about the tone and pacing is very similar to "A Confederacy of Dunces", which might explain the polarizing reviews.

A wonderful skewering of fusion cuisine and the British ex-pat community. My complete review is at http://colreads.blogspot.com/2011/07/...

Writing good humor is difficult enough, but writing a humorous novel - intentionally humorous, I should specify - seems nearly impossible. It’s like building a firetruck out of banana peels. That said, this is hands down the funniest novel I’ve read in years. Gerald Samper is an erudite, civilized, petty buffoon, and Hamilton-Paterson’s magic is to sustain this character in a highly unstable emulsion of sympathy and disdain. Gerald lives vigorously in a personal bubble of cheerful delusion, caustic superiority and culinary dementia, but you can’t help but have a soft spot for him, and you’ll find yourself agreeing with him more often than you might have supposed. This is a sharp, playful, dazzling book - and there are SEQUELS. Well justified, in this case.

Great book and very funny. I had never heard of this book or author but the unusual title tempted me to try it. I look forward to reading more of his books

one of 3 about gerald (gerreee!) and Marta? there are at least 2 of these titles anyway.

Excellent lunatic preposterous read, full of demented recipes, like sponge cake with mortadella icing. The plot is lame and irrelevant.

The NYT describes this novel as provoking "the sort of indecorous involuntary laughter that has more in common with sneezing than chuckling. Imagine a British John Waters crossed with David Sedaris.”

John Waters crossed with David Sedaris? Now, that's a huge personality. I'm not sure that Gerald lives up to that.

The tale of these two mismatched friends (Gerald and Marta) is told through alternating POVs. Gerald starts out first and from his initial description I was already anti-Marta. What an idiot, I thought. Then, as soon as I read from Marta's perspective, I immediately thought of Gerald as the quintessential rube.

I wanted to laugh out loud but sadly, I did not. Maybe I needed to read this novel as more of a satire or parody. Perhaps, Hamilton-Paterson meant it as such; I mean, why else would some of Gerald's recipes call for smoked cat?

There were visions of potential greatness here, especially between the internal banter between Gerald and Marta. Some of it was just silly (and perhaps a bit disturbing).

I love a good Sedaris-like wit and I like a weird read. I just didn't get this.