Translated by Eleanor Updegraff
Teresa Präauer’s Cooking in the Wrong Century: Keeping up appearances in the internet age
If you liked the satirical chamber play that was Zoe Dubno’s Happiness and Love, you’ll eat up Teresa Präauer’s new novel (pardon the pun).
Estimated reading time: 3-4 minutes
A jazz playlist, algorithmically curated, the perfect background music; a brand-new Danish dining table; one whole case of crémant d’Alsace: in Cooking in the Wrong Century by Teresa Präauer, these are but some of the tasteful ingredients for the hostess’ impeccably planned dinner party.
Tension simmers from the outset of Präauer’s novel, the creeping unease cleverly carried over into English by Eleanor Updegraff. Throughout the novel, the dinner party restarts and is reimagined several times, with characters’ behaviour and arrival times changing, the success of the dinner party endangered at one point and saved the next. Introduced by short ingredient lists and interspersed with flashbacks in which the reader is addressed directly, each iteration of the night unfolds in the third person, from the hostess’ perspective. Only the hostess knows how painstakingly coordinated this evening is, though it is implied that this level of staging, from the many unread books on the shelf, to the buffalo horn salt dish from Kenya “representing the whole world”, is part and parcel of hosting a dinner party which will be “put on public display” via Instagram.
The characters are distinguished by their roles (the hostess and her partner, the husband and wife, the Swiss man) – they are not given names. This heightens the all-encompassing, claustrophobic feeling of this dinner party: we only learn about these characters in relation to this one evening, as guests. And even then, we don’t know much about who they are, because there is a strong sense of keeping up appearances in this novel, fueled by a need to impress and the flowing alcohol. In the face of this, and of her friends who show up late, keep their shoes on in the flat, and burn cigarette holes in her expensive teatowels, the hostess tries to cling on to her “practiced composure”.
Delicious descriptions of meals enjoyed in the past and the evening’s homemade quiche are layered in amongst discussions of gentrification, immigration, gender roles and the growing dominance of English – “People used to say Prost, now it’s cheers, said the Swiss man.” The narrative voice is passive, detached, much like the way the characters discuss these topics. These forty-somethings have “become accustomed to luxury” and their social mobility has delivered them to the peak of good taste, the sophisticated dinner party.
Präauer dissects the ways that, in the twenty-first century, our consumer choices have come to define us: social media has changed our personal tastes into our personal brands. I couldn’t help feeling a bit of schadenfreude at the way Präauer satirises and criticises her bourgeois characters, followed by the inevitable shame when I recognised parts of myself in these characters, too. Thanks to Eleanor Updegraff’s skillful translation, the style of this novel is sharp but also playful. Don’t read it hungry though, or you’ll be left craving quiche.