Tama's Reviews > When I Open the Shop

Invested interest has me nervous to read ‘When I Open the Shop.’ I gave some minor notes and opinions on the opening section of romesh’s early draft. And I can call romesh a friend. The one thing I said in my feedback no-one else had yet was that it was funny. I said it was really funny. (Encouragement!) I was laughing out loud a few times a page (me: hard won!). And romesh was taken aback at this accolade. Because not one person had found it funny, or funny enough to note. I thought maybe I’d misstepped and offended, surely not. I asked romesh, do you think it’s funny? Yeah, I think it’s funny.

[At the launch the publisher called it a sad book (grief!) And from the publisher it feels a definitive statement. Romesh maintains it’s funny (in a way that pokes fun at neuroticism, but must first be read from the perspective of one with tricky mentality)!]

I had been excited for the book launch when I knew the book had landed at THW. And that initial excitement was nothing to what I felt the past week. I was smiling all day walking around town in circles doing the most intensive drafting work on my novella—3k+ words within a few hours! Time was passing in twenty minute several hundred word chunks it was awesome! I was keening for the work in Te Awe library—breathing loudly, burping from large kebab indigestion and suppressing exclamations at the words I was typing! Under my breath escaped a “ohh” that wanted to become something more and louder. It’s so cool that prose writing can come this easily through a keyboard versus my necessity to draft on paper for screenplay format—I don’t know what it is. I think there’s so many angles the character’s voices have to come around that the inorganic mode of staring at screen kills their clashing voices. It’s all psychological.

At the launch when I saw romesh, crossing the road with Saraih, as Stella and I sat outside picking through an $8.90 end of day katsu bowl, I raised my fist and shook it victoriously: “ROMESH!” (Part of my excitement was that I might see and share in romesh’s victory with several people I care about, the two key players who tapped out were my sister and Kelda. Sorely missed.)

I read up on ‘Amma’ the other book launched jointly—touching how connected (felt so real at the launch!) romesh and Sariah have been as writers over the course of both book’s lives and ongoing. ‘Amma’ sounds like an emotional-power-work and must-read. Can’t not read it now I know about it! Romesh and Saraih’s speeches for each other outdid both their guest speakers! Because they were heartfelt and lovingly eloquent in a way that comes from emotional investment, there was so much meaning for both of them to share that moment!

I vowed to really READ the book. There’s nothing else I could do but to really READ it. That would be a disservice. It should go with out saying, but I have to tell myself to make sure I do READ ‘When I Open the Shop,’ moreso than the early draft. (I can see a jaded point where one reads the early drafts super intensely so as to try their hand at influencing something, then flicks through the finished one until they hit the acknowledgments page and cry that their name isn’t gilded in its own box at the top.) I’m so excited to see all the work that has gone into the book. Editing is such a crazy process! Ngā mihi, romesh.

Stella bought it for her dad, but read it first. She texted me about a scene where the narrator cooks with his ancestors. I think she thought I’d read the whole book already. I didn’t know how this scene would materialise, I imagined spectres swirling around the narrator’s frying pan handle holding hand. That was a very anime idea. [Later I would read a cooking scene with anime stylisation in my mind, the animated forced perspective going crazy.] It’s been weird recently with ‘Dragon Age: Origins’ how blatantly coded some of these “fantasy” narratives are—caste systems, indigenous elves etc. In ‘Final Fantasy XV’ Gladiolus asks Noctis if he’s ready to face his ancestors with what strength he has; then he berates Noctis to “be serious,” Noctis’ “vitality” increases. (The game gives you two options for Noctis’ decision making brat or benevolence. I’ve been benevolent, I made a political ally when there were such funny bratty options. If I didn’t respect this game’s story I’d be doing the funny options. The medieval politics are serious (and epic) to me.)

The differences between romesh’s narrator and Noctis are vast. Noctis’ is closer to an American facing Irish ancestry. It is less important to NOW.

I’ve been procrastinating reading ‘When I Open the Shop.’ I think I could get to Goodreads’ word limit like this. This has all been lead up.

I have to approach the book as reading something casually. I can always come back for more. There will never be a perfect time to read it, there will simply be a time!

That Vic Cafe meeting with romesh before their move to Melbourne featured talk about Beckett and Camus. The opening line makes me think I’ll be more connected to the references to absurdist lit, the dissociative narrator/character. Maybe the reading to give notes ruined reading it for me, it was a new experience for me. I don’t annotate books normally. There was some confusion behind that reading. [The book exceeds that opening reference--a nod--romesh wrote something else.]

I think romesh knows it was more of a social thing in the end. I don’t think I helped draft 2 & 3, I didn’t feel useful to the manuscript. Remains to be seen. Maybe I was useful to Romesh emotionally! [I said my notes were more “hype,” Romesh seemed to agree, or didn’t deny it. At the time I’d noted, as a personal thing I don’t like when books drop a named local location. It doesn’t really work when it’s one street of no significance, simply a location. Why should the book have to be placed? What does the book have to say about the chosen place? romesh’s book is placed definitively in Te-Whanganui-a-Tara, and it is a part of the story. The identity of the book can’t be without this city, with all that it holds and promotes.] [I remember asking a question against the white guy's life story--there are many people like this who'll happily spin their tale even if it is filled with sadness and other weights. I noted that I thought it went on too long, because I got the point of it early. Rome asked what I would suggest but I didn't have a solution. Reading it this time I wasn't distracted by this thought. But I wonder now how it would read if it was summarised to a paragraph description of the themes of the story the character tells and the way he performs it as a story, as a character portrait rather than a seperate narrative. And on top of that raise the subjects that drive the narrator to comment on it, the controlling white guy, asian-fetishist commentary etc. At the same time, summarising it would limit this hateful voice in the book which I wonder if it is distracting. It is unpleasant.]

Holy shit. romesh is good. Visceral breakfast dropping moment.

Maybe I was reading for prose, that first time around, and not for story. Though I understood it I knew there wasn’t going to be a conclusion. As a stand-alone section it works in painting this tragic character. With the third section there is a satisfying change in his life where things are working out—but there had to be a change, at least in the narrator (but he couldn’t help having fallen to tragedy at the start as he didn’t feel supported in who he was by the place he was in etc.!)

Romesh knows the chef character so well. Implements cooking into narrative and character moments. Puffy “cryer’s” eyes from late night cooking.

To be obsessed with an actress because her character makes gazpacho in-film.

But realises it was the director that had her making gazpacho! What does creating relationships with these distant people say, “Pedro and me.”? If it affects your art (I don’t think Almodovar is teaching a chef anything.)

I think I should start looking at novels as personal collections of references. When an author specifically chooses Pedro Almodovar despite no obvious connection (neuroticism?) to the work at hand, that’s a part of the author’s character. Pop culture references are something I have to question. Sometimes they’re cheap, whether that’s cheap as a reference, etc. like throwing dirt like dice, it works as a simile to show the relaxed manner he is gambling with the procedure of grief and funerals but it doesn’t relate to cheffing, we must know from that he has played dice games before.

Fixate on “toot paper” being in the published work.

Specific cheffing neuroticism. First, having fantastical crushes on customers. Second, picturing one’s own insides while preparing meat “clicking and grinding of cartilage”; and the porky smell of burnt skin; this brought on after writing about sliced up palm wounds. I felt ill. I’d read up to Part Two. This is new to me now.

This narrator is as or more complicated than Pip Adam’s ‘Nothing to See.’ The identity of the character is layered in ways that surprise Romesh and the reader, and feel real. Romesh’s book is half the length, yay.

Zebedee says he needs to reread ‘The Island’ part. He rushed it to get back to the food. Salt is important too. But I saw why there was so much reverence for romesh from Zeb. Romesh wrote a food novel. And after ‘The Island’ section, you really do get food. All sorts of dishes over a dinner party. And a simple scone after vivid and satisfying cafe renovation (felt like a Tycoon video game). The new shop is a place you want to be and support, for the comfort of place, people, and food!

When Stella was reading this book she texted me amongst saying how “so very amazing” it is, “Omg, grapefruit eating scene, he GETS it.” “Cooking with his ma and anxestors woah pinprick tears in my eyes as I turned each page.”

Seeing Paul’s IG story soon after the book hit shelves was nice. A photo of the book, grass, and allusion to the act of reading it. That people who know romesh are reading it, yay!

Maybe it shouldn’t have been a grapefruit at the end, maybe it should’ve been a fruit from here or there, or both, closest I can think is a kiwi fruit being a Chinese fruit with a key identity in Aotearoa. What’s a Sri Lankan/Kazakh/Korean/Russki fruit that has the same effect..? Romesh tried to tell me it’s pop fiction. I countered, “the narrator is too complex, the references reach far” [grapefruit at that moment resists being on-the-nose] they make curious abstractions of it.

I am wondering on choices to have Almodovar at the start; then Indian, Korean and British media at the opposite end of the book. The references are as complex as a person’s taste. They are at least paying respects to the art that has made an artist (inherent). Almodovar’s Spain lives in the xenophobic part of the narrator’s perspective, or, put more lightly, when he is confused about his identity. Satyajit Ray, Park Chan-wook, and an English guy belong to the section where the narrator has accepted his lot, with the will to be varied. [This is getting analytical.]

The double sided perspective this book shares of: the results of our society's perpetual inequality and the segregation created by that inequality on POC, and the things that make community for POC—culture and like-minded people. We shouldn't be begging the question of why POC need these spaces, we should ask why Devendra didn't feel supported or safe in the world when he lost his mother. We shouldn't read and desire exotic foods cooked by the people that will know the food better than us when they remain behind a closed kitchen door. That's not healthy. We should go to these restaurants (and tip). But not maintain that divide: to have a table of six rude white people in such a restaurant isn't righteous, that's inequality. It's inequality if even one of those people can't go home and cook with as many spices.

There's also something to be said of the Y2K perspective. Where part of our social lives from c.MSN through to 2015 was DMing at home, these conversations maybe more private and strange and full of character than the ones you might have on the edges of the schoolyard. Cartoons on the TV. Not looking after oneself, not learned how yet. The exchange between the narrator and Aisha at her house is weighted, with all that history. And it is historical, in that way, of that time.