Pan de limón con semillas de amapola

Author: Cristina Campos
- Fiction
- Grupo Planeta
- ISBN: 978-8408149538
- Release Date: 01-26-2016
-Reviewed by: Félix Lizarraga

Pan de limón con semillas de amapola (Lemon Poppy Seed Cake) is Cristina Campos’ first novel, and tells the story of sisters Marina and Anna, who unexpectedly and mysteriously inherit a bakery from a complete stranger, and the ways in which that inheritance changes their lives forever.

This blurb of sorts sums up both the book’s faults and virtues. This is not a book that captured me from the beginning. Each chapter starts with a bread recipe, something that was too similar for my taste to Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate, and the flashbacks-within-flashbacks did not work smoothly for me until, close to a hundred pages later, I had a better hold on the narrative. Halfway into the novel, Campos’ third-person invisible narrator starts morphing more and more, rather awkwardly, into an Austen or Dickens-like persona who comments on the events with some amusement and calls Anna or Marina “our heroine.”

I was not surprised to discover that Campos had made a career as a film casting director, and that the novel had started as a move script. (And will probably end as one: it was selected for screen adaptation at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival –as Poppyseed Lemon Cake.) The book has a very cinematic structure, and is predominantly visual.

Somewhat to my surprise, however, after those first hundred pages, my investment in the story started to grow. Sheltered Anna and rootless Marina are the main protagonists of Pan de limón…, and the puzzle of their inheritance is the heart of the novel, but there are a myriad other characters, most of which are tridimensional, intriguing, and very believable: Néstor, their fondly remembered father; Armando, Anna’s obnoxious (and unfaithful) husband; Anita, Anna’s troubled teenage daughter; Mathias, Marina’s boyfriend, a physician devoted to humanitarian causes; Naomi, the Ethiopian orphan with whom Marina develops a unique bond; Imelda, Anna’s Filipino maid, who sacrifices her entire life for the good of her daughter and ends up discovering that her daughter does not need her; Úrsula, Marina’s German-Argentinean neighbor, a novelist suffering from writer’s block and who loves, among other books, Like Water for Chocolate; and many others, including Lola Molí, the sisters’ mysterious benefactress.

The dialog is vivid and engaging, sprinkled with a lot of Balearic (a good part of the novel is set in Mallorca), some German and even English, and it is always a pleasure to read –unlike the inconsistent and somewhat uneven narrative voice. The many plots and subplots, however, never seem to meander and end up converging in ways that are never too predictable. There is drama, comedy, and even tragedy, but the general tone is one of serenity; even unsavory, unpleasant characters like Armando are seen as flawed human beings, never as simplified stereotypes.

 

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