Book Review

reviewed by Katherine Cummings

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"Sex, Knives & Bouillabaisse, by Teri Louise Kelly

Sex, Knives & Bouillabaisse

by Teri Louise Kelly
Published by Wakefield Press, Kent Town I.S.B.N. 978 1862547568

When I started reading Sex, Knives and Bouillabaisse I was under the impression I was reading a novel written in the first person. I thought it was quick, funny, witty and way over the top, rather like a Thomas Berger novel, full of exaggeration and impossible flights of crazy humour. When it dawned on me that I was reading an autobiography by someone who had lived these mad, over-the-top experiences, my enjoyment increased tenfold.

Sex, Knives & Bouillabaisse tells the story of an apprentice chef who learns his trade in a large hotel amid a crowd of certifiable lunatics who should never have been allowed near sharp knives, let alone cleavers and pointy meat-hooks.

The opening scenes are like a cross between something out of Dickens, where orphan boys are housed in squalid conditions and forced to work long hours under brutal taskmasters, and a fantasy by Ronald Firbank, where each character prances through a nightmare of scalding broths, red-hot pans and razor-sharp implements.

The central character, Luiz Rodriguez, has a real name, but pretty well everyone else goes by a mad nickname, so that the chef is known as the Duce, The Man, Boss Hogg or the Fuhrer, and others glory in sobriquets like Y.G. (who was almost called the Sperminator thanks to his success with women), Bumble and Herman.

Herman is said to remind one of a young Goebbels, because of his round glasses and clipped hair, but I think the author means Himmler as I can't find any images of Goebbels in glasses, and his hair was greased down rather than clipped. San fairy Ann. She confuses Jack Hawkins with Jim Hawkins, too, but in return for so much mad hilarity I can easily forgive the odd smidgin of fallibility. Infallibility is over-rated, if you ask me. What has the Pope written one tenth as entertaining as this?

The writer's best friend and fellow victim from Day One is Billy, a boy from the North of England whose interests revolve around pinball machines and ferrets. The writer himself (this is becoming too complicated ... I had better tell you now that the author, Teri Louise Kelly is One Of Us, a transgender who for the duration of this volume was a young man - with some rather sexy cross-dressing towards the end - and presumably in later volumes will come to realize Her True Nature and liberate the poor bitch locked in a man's body).

Sorry for the strong language, but Teri's book is full of it and one falls into the idiom, or part way into it, making allowances for my general prudery and old-age. The aforementioned Bumble also graduates from stealing ladies' underwear to transitioning from male to female (I am giving away a little of the plot here, but the plot is so generous with its madness that a small taste of the content is not going to spoil the meal for you).

We are constantly fascinated/appalled/amused by the crazy antics of individuals and by inter-tribal pranks and feuds between subsets of the cooking staff, with side-glances at porters, F.& B.s (i.e. food and beverage managers or anyone who wears a suit and tie), chambermaids, cocktail barmen and the implacable laundry women who toil incessantly in the bowels of the hotel, eradicating unspeakable stains from the chefs' impeccable whites.

But there are also really fascinating descriptions, exaggerated I hope, of the life of the apprentice going to Catering School intermittently between coping with the crises and disasters created in serving hundreds of meals a day to the clientele and keeping ones niche in the pecking order. The crises include Christmas meals which run out of vital ingredients like stuffing, the late customer who rolls in just before closing and demands a complicated eight-course meal, the feuds between staff members, solved some-times by stealth (the surreptitiously laxative-laced chocolates) or more directly, with kung-fu in the kitchen, or street brawling in the lane outside ("I smiled, took a step forward and as he began to make his golden slipper move I kicked him in the gooleys ...").

There are vivid descriptions of what happens to food that is returned to the kitchen as being unsatisfactory (be warned ... don't do it ... or if you do, don't think of eating it when it comes back to you!).

And there is confirmatory evidence (I have heard this from friends of mine who worked briefly in the profession) that one should never venture into the sacred working areas of even the most prestigious and chic establishments if one ever intends to eat out again!

Towards the end of the book Luiz goes on exchange to Paris for three months and learns a different attitude to food and its preparation, and also starts to move in the direction of transition, spending her last night in Paris at the Prostitutes Ball with demi-mondaine friends. I quote: "If ... you have attempted to dance the stomp in a ridiculously tight skirt and dangerously high heels while tanked full of potent liquor, you will immediately understand what the night was like, and if you haven't, then I recommend it."

Having done much of this (without the potent liquor) in my younger years, I heartily endorse and recommend Teri's attitude to life and living and the energy and exhilaration she imparts in her narrative. At the end we see her setting out to conquer the United States and presumably her travels will carry her Down Under in later volumes, as she now lives in South Australia.

In addition to being entertained and educated by Sex, Knives & Bouillabaisse I must record that it is one of those rare books that made me laugh out loud ... more than once. I finished it within a day, regretting when the last page was turned that there would be no more. But wait, as they say on television, there is more! Two more volumes promised. Bring them on!

Terri Louise Kelly started life as Terrence Malcolm "Luiz" Rodriguez in England. After a stretch in the pen for vandalism Luiz started to train as a chef in 1975 and won Britain's Young Chef of the Year in 1981. He then traveled and worked in France, Bermuda, North America, Australia and New Zealand. In 1999 she started the formal process of becoming Louise and now goes by the name Teri Louise Kelly. She lives in South Australia and is married to Melanie. She is a gender warrior, literary critic, author, artist and general trouble-maker. In 2007 she won the Feast Short Story Competition.

Teri has asked us to provide her email and MySpace addresses. Her email is atta-girl@hotmail.com and her MySpace address is www.myspace.com/terilouisekelly

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