Tropical Longing: May 2021 Book + Bottle Pairing
This book + bottle pairing is part of our Readers + Drinkers Club. Each month, as a member of the Readers + Drinkers Club, you will receive a curated book + bottle pairing for only $40. New releases, celebrated stories, and literary deep cuts all have a place here and are paired with great bottles of outside-the-box wines. We also write this blog post to give you a review of the book and the corresponding bottle so you have all the information to fully enjoy your pairing!
With my mind on Earth Day, I chose this month’s book as something that paid homage to our beautiful planet. I was immediately struck by the reviews that mention “the book’s emphasis on how people connect (or don’t) to their planet,” and “[Swarup] stirs your curiosity about the earth,” and “a series of stories that join human lives to the natural world.” I read the book, and BAM, we had a winner.
THE BOOK
I’ve been coveting this book since it first arrived on our shelves last May. Not only is the title seductive, Latitudes of Longing, but the cover is simply riveting - bright, bold colors reminiscent of a beachside jungle, but upon closer inspection, you’ll also see the lights of a dense city tucked into a valley, snowcapped mountains, and a river running through a desert landscape. Here at the shop, we often faced this book outward for the simple pleasure it gave our eyes as they drifted across the colorful bookshelves. The story within the covers is similar: immediately intriguing, yet full of nuance, and profoundly comforting. The paperback is coming out in a month or so, but I wanted you to have this gorgeous hardcover for your own shelf reflection.
The book has four parts, linked by a character or two from one to the next, some making additional appearances in the stories as ghosts. The book has some elements of magical realism - or spirituality - some of the characters are so connected to the world around them that they appear almost magical. Some are connected to the earth through profound scientific study, through pain, or through love. This whole story, in fact, is about interconnection, and the greatest type of all - love.
The structure is experimental and literary, weaving languid prose around quirky, everyday stories of a handful of characters across India, Burma, Nepal, and Pakistan. It’s not drastically action-oriented, but it creates an exotic, romantic world that’s a pleasure to indulge in. It’s so hard to describe the plot because it’s more character building and literary than it is plot-driven. We loved the descriptions of the Varmas’ garden, of the view from the top of a mountain, of Girija Prasad describing snow to his wife who had never experienced it. We loved the unlikely bonds between a lost soul and a stripper and the budding romance between two Octogenarians. We loved watching Girija Prasad and Chanda Devi fall in love. We loved that a folktale of a turtle that turned into a boat to be with her son resonated so strongly with the heart-wrenching story of Plato and Rose Mary. Overall, it’s just an experience that you’ll want to have. Perfect for a lazy, warm day, when you want to feel strongly.
This is the author’s first published work, and congrats to her - she won so many awards for it! It won the Tata Literature Live! Award for debut fiction, was shortlisted for the JCB Prize for Indian Literature, and longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award 2020 and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. From the JCB Prize website: “Latitudes of Longing sweeps through worlds and times that are inhabited by: a scientist who studies trees and a clairvoyant who talks to them; Lord Goodenough who travels around the furthest reaches of the Raj, giving names to nameless places; a geologist working towards ending futile wars over a glacier; octogenarian lovers; a superstitious dictator and a mother struggling to get her revolutionary son released; a yeti who seeks human companionship; a turtle who turns first into a boat and then a woman; and the ghost of an evaporated ocean as restless as the continents. A geological fault line at the heart of this brilliantly-conceptualised novel mirrors the journeys of its characters.”
THE WINE
This one was challenging to pick a wine for since the book ranged all over four distinct stories. How can you capture all of that in a single bottle?
ISLANDS: Overtly tropical in nature, I wanted something with notes of tropical fruit to set our original scene in the dense jungle of the Andaman Islands. It needed some minerality for the ocean, and something romantic for the beautiful love story between Chanda Devi and Girija Prasad.
FAULTLINE: This story is hard, like the resin Plato reflects on in his jail cell. We needed a wine with a grit and hope that could reflect the strong bond between a mother and her son.
VALLEY: The wine would need to have ginger notes, like the ginger Plato sucks on to relish his freedom, “it is sharp, like the irony of being free in exile (201). It needs to reflect the cleanness of mountain air.
SNOW DESERT: The wine must reflect complexity and whispers of age, and the jasmine that Apo rubs on his wrists, and blood apricots the ones that bear a red drop in their flesh, close to the seed, “a reminder of a Sufi’s quest for his beloved” (268).
Well, we found exactly the right wine for this: On the nose, Field Recording SKINS is light and perfumed with jasmine and honeysuckle and dried apricots, and something saline like ocean brine. It’s tropical smelling, like longan fruit and lemon leaves. This wine has a rich mouthfeel and is bone dry. There are delicate, supple tannins which add interest to the white wine palate of Florida orange, ripe mango, and bitter almond. Following that, you’ll get an essence of dried apricots again and a burst of spicy pink ginger.
SKINS is a blend of several grapes: Chenin Blanc, Pinot Gris, Albarino, Verdelho, and Riesling. It’s called SKINS because they leave these white grapes to ferment on their skins which extracts a bit of that gorgeous salmon color and the nice light tannins from the grape skins (did you know that Pinot Gris is more of a pink grape than a green one?). This is also called an orange wine, because of that gorgeous color it develops from being on its skins.
“Alone, she retrieves the mango skin her husband had so carefully peeled half an hour ago. It reminds her of the bright-orange flesh the two had shared, the toughts they had exchanged. She caresses the skin with her fingers, rubbing it and sniffing it in turn. Fibrous and wet on the inside, smooth, glistening, and fragrant on the outside. Is the what human skin is like? she wonders.”
We love this wine with this book because the wine pairs delightfully with spicy foods, especially Indian, which you might start craving after reading this. In fact, one of our favorite winemaker/somms Raj Parr says that his favorite wine pairing with Indian food is a skin contact white! The complexity and texture from the grape skins allows the wine to stand up to a hearty meal, while the refreshing perfume juiciness helps tame all the spices. We definitely recommend getting Indian food takeout, perhaps a dal curry, jalfrezi, or maybe even a warm korma dish to pair with this tasty little wine. And for dessert, gulab jamun - rose, cardamon, and saffron scented milk balls, of course.
OTHER RECOMMENDATIONS:
If you like this book, you might also like Deepa Anappara’s Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line, She Would be King by Wayetu Moore, or The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy.
If you like this wine, you might be pleased to try dry rieslings like Dr. Loosen’s Red Slate, our super interesting Malvasia from Slovenia, or our new Licia Albariño.
Read more about this book: https://www.thehindu.com/books/the-seed-of-the-novel-lies-in-disbelief-shubhangi-swarup/article30759640.ece