January Not Fiction Book Discussions

The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese by Michael Paterniti is a meditation on the act of storytelling in both content and form.

Paterniti set out to tell the idyllic tale of an artisanal cheese from Spain, Páramo de Guzmán, "made with love" from an old family recipe. But what started out as a simple foodie travelogue became a memoir of Paterniti's decade-long quixotic search for Truth as he found himself enamored with its maker, Ambrosio Molinos de las Heras, and entangled in a blood feud between two old friends, even moving his young family to Spain and missing deadlines with his publisher. The Telling Room could be said to be a book about itself and how it was in danger of not being written. In an interview with his editor, Andy Ward, at longform.org, Paterniti explained the paralyzing significance that this cheese and its maker took on for him:

"The cheese symbolized the past, and the past's place in the present. And more. The deeper I fell into Ambrosio's story, the more I found myself in emotional and meta tangles. There was a betrayal, and a murder plot. Would Ambrosio kill his betrayer? Suddenly, the cheese stood in for love, but also for hate. It was mystical, and then became soul-less. It was about the promise of fame and riches, and then bankruptcy. It seemed to carry so much metaphoric weight it couldn't stand up under its own legend. . . . I went looking for an ideal that I thought existed, as if I were searching for the Fountain of Youth or something. . . . But then maybe I went looking for people a little like me, too, those who become lost, and then found again, in the most unexpected ways." 

While Paterniti could have saved himself a lot of grief if he had maintained a professional journalistic distance from his subject, the resulting book would have been very different. How would a more objective book about Ambrosio be different from the one Paterniti actually wrote? Have you ever started something dispassionately, perhaps as a job, that ultimately became very personal--and very complicated? Where you became part of the story?

The Telling Room mirrors in form Paterniti's experience of being "in emotional and meta tangles," lost and then found, through the inclusion of many footnotes, including one that reads, "I would soon find out that digression was a national pastime in Castile, that to get to the crux of any matter you had to listen for hours, weeks, months, years." How does the book recreate Paterniti's time in Ambrosio's telling room? And how does it embody Ambrosio's  concept of the "disability of memory," which he defines by saying "Everything is rushing forward, so I must go back"? What is the relationship between storytelling and memory?

Mike Paterniti, his wife, Sara Corbett, and Susan Conley, all writers, created a nonprofit in 2004 in Portland, Maine, called The Telling Room "dedicated to the idea that children and young adults are natural storytellers." Visit their website, www.tellingroom.org, to learn more about their programs and publications.

And join our discussion: Tuesday, January 6, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, January 22, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.