Reflexions

Rating:
Summary: Reflexions
Review: "Mr. Olney's influence in the culinary profession was profound...." -R.W. Apple Jr., New York Times, August 4, 1999

"...an unparalleled view of French food and wine." -William Rice, Chicago Tribune, August 11, 1999

"Richard Olney, one of the most influential cookbook writers of his generation...." -Russ Parsons, Los Angeles Times, August 11, 1999

"Olney was well ahead of his time. He was without doubt, one of the most influential of modern writers about food. He has a very strong claim to be considered the best." -Times, London, August 4, 1999

"Richard Olney's writings may come to share the position bestowed upon A. Escoffier's 1903 Guide Culinaire as the international authoritative culinary text of the 20th century. A pair well-matched, Escoffier preached "Faites simple" and devoted his career to eradicating the excessive culinary follies invented by his predecessors." -Nora Carey, Independent, London, August 28, 1999

"Although he was an American, Richard Olney...was one of the foremost writers on French food and wine.... He was admired and respected by the French gastronomic community...." -Jill Norman, Guardian, Manchester, August 1999

"He was not as famous as Julia Child...but he was in many ways just as influential...the expatriot theorist who revolutionized the way the best American chefs think about food." -Donald Kaul, Des Moines Register, August 11, 1999

Words can barely do justice to this lavishly rich and detailed chronicle of Richard Olney by Richard Olney. Detailing a lifetime of people and places and events Richard Olney captures the heart and imagination of food and wine lovers throughout the world.

Rating:
Summary: more chilly than charming
Review: At one point in his story Olney recounts a demonstration he gave to some women's club in Tulsa. At the end of the class, he distributes portions of the dessert souflee he has made. The ladies respond with statements like "interesting" and so on. When Olney tastes it, however, he realizes that he has substituted salt for sugar. Now in his telling of this anecdote, there is a clear implication that the women are fools and dishonest to boot. But anyone outside of the rareified circles Olney travelled in would know that what he was witnessing wasn't ignorance but courtesy, even charity. The ladies were simply too kind to tell him that his food was dreadful.
Now Olney's misreading of the situation is telling: it highlights a streak of real nastiness that runs through his memoir, an unwillingness to pass over human foibles or to give people the benefit of the doubt. For me, at least, this limits the pleasure I can take in the book's other considerable charms.
His responses to wine are beautifully, even seductively recorded; his descriptions of food are, surprisingly, less frequent and less memorable.
I found the admiration he records for his brother James's achievements as a capable but generally unremarkable academic touching. Here is this fellow, a good friend of the likes of Auden and James Baldwin, reverently noting the publication of his sibling's dutiful scholarly tomes. This is what true brotherly love looks like.
Olney's life was fascinating and in some respects enviable, but I can't say that I particularly warmed to him.
Keep in mind that for all his meticulous recording of his social life, he lay dead in his home for three days before anyone found him--and even then it was the gardener. There is a sort of grim pentimento here beneath this self portrait--the artist as lonely, besotted misanthrope. How sad!

Rating:
Summary: more chilly than charming
Review: At one point in his story Olney recounts a demonstration he gave to some women's club in Tulsa. At the end of the class, he distributes portions of the dessert souflee he has made. The ladies respond with statements like "interesting" and so on. When Olney tastes it, however, he realizes that he has substituted salt for sugar. Now in his telling of this anecdote, there is a clear implication that the women are fools and dishonest to boot. But anyone outside of the rareified circles Olney travelled in would know that what he was witnessing wasn't ignorance but courtesy, even charity. The ladies were simply too kind to tell him that his food was dreadful.
Now Olney's misreading of the situation is telling: it highlights a streak of real nastiness that runs through his memoir, an unwillingness to pass over human foibles or to give people the benefit of the doubt. For me, at least, this limits the pleasure I can take in the book's other considerable charms.
His responses to wine are beautifully, even seductively recorded; his descriptions of food are, surprisingly, less frequent and less memorable.
I found the admiration he records for his brother James's achievements as a capable but generally unremarkable academic touching. Here is this fellow, a good friend of the likes of Auden and James Baldwin, reverently noting the publication of his sibling's dutiful scholarly tomes. This is what true brotherly love looks like.
Olney's life was fascinating and in some respects enviable, but I can't say that overall I particularly warmed to him.
Keep in mind that for all his meticulous recording of his social life, he lay dead in his home for three days before anyone found him--and even then it was the gardener. There is a sort of grim pentimento here beneath this self portrait--the artist as lonely, besotted misanthrope. How sad!

Rating:
Summary: correction
Review: Egads, here by his own hand we see for ourselves what a nasty, petty, vindictive man Mr. Olney was. On and on and on we read of "friendships" with people he can't stand yet who stay in his life year after year after year. Why, we wonder? Mr. Olney reveals himself to be a loner, probably not very happy in the world, who lived off a family allowance or inheritance (we're never quite sure) until the early 1970s when his reputation for someone who knows food and wine launches him into cookbook writing (generally successfully, though not a real superstar like, say, Julia Child and M.F.K. Fisher, both of whom he detests). What we're left with here is a self-portrait of a man who didn't fit in, who was elitist and petty and mean-spirited, and the one pleasure of this book is that he's so nasty we can't look away until the end, like watching a car accident. The early part of the book works well as a portrait of a young homosexual painter with a trust fund "struggling" as he eeeks out a Bohemian life before finding and moving into a house in the countryside. Again and again we are told of people trying to seduce him and yet he never takes anyone up on this. What, are we to believe he never had sex after his first black lover and he part ways? This functions well as a look into the catty inner circle of the food world, but in the end, all I felt was pity for Mr. Olney, a man who never fit in and who seemed to take pleasure only in the superficial. Perhaps, I'm wrong, but that's the way it reads in this book, which by the way starts out like a book and then becomes mostly a collection of diary entries and letter excerpts. Glad I read it. You may find it interesting as I did. But I did not like Mr. Olney at all reading between the lines, and I suspect that's why he has so much antipathy toward seemingly everyone, because they didn't like him either. I doubt this book will be around for long. Stock up and sell high in the future.

Rating:
Summary: Ouch!
Review: Egads, here by his own hand we see for ourselves what a nasty, petty, vindictive man Mr. Olney was. On and on and on we read of "friendships" with people he can't stand yet who stay in his life year after year after year. Why, we wonder? Mr. Olney reveals himself to be a loner, probably not very happy in the world, who lived off a family allowance or inheritance (we're never quite sure) until the early 1970s when his reputation for someone who knows food and wine launches him into cookbook writing (generally successfully, though not a real superstar like, say, Julia Child and M.F.K. Fisher, both of whom he detests). What we're left with here is a self-portrait of a man who didn't fit in, who was elitist and petty and mean-spirited, and the one pleasure of this book is that he's so nasty we can't look away until the end, like watching a car accident. The early part of the book works well as a portrait of a young homosexual painter with a trust fund "struggling" as he eeeks out a Bohemian life before finding and moving into a house in the countryside. Again and again we are told of people trying to seduce him and yet he never takes anyone up on this. What, are we to believe he never had sex after his first black lover and he part ways? This functions well as a look into the catty inner circle of the food world, but in the end, all I felt was pity for Mr. Olney, a man who never fit in and who seemed to take pleasure only in the superficial. Perhaps, I'm wrong, but that's the way it reads in this book, which by the way starts out like a book and then becomes mostly a collection of diary entries and letter excerpts. Glad I read it. You may find it interesting as I did. But I did not like Mr. Olney at all reading between the lines, and I suspect that's why he has so much antipathy toward seemingly everyone, because they didn't like him either. I doubt this book will be around for long. Stock up and sell high in the future.

Rating:
Summary: correction
Review: I must object to one reader-reviewer's description of Richard Olney's brother James as "a capable but generally unremarkable academic." Autobiography as a field of literary criticism did not exist before James Olney's landmark book, Metaphors of Self. As a writer, teacher, and organizer of dozens of conferences and institutes on autobiography, he has been the most dominant presence and most pervasive influence on others in the field he created, even those who disagree with him.
And his brother Richard's book, while gossipy, is eloquent and charming.

Rating:
Summary: An honest glimpse into an inspired life
Review: I've just finished reading 'Reflexions' and am more than sad to find Olney hadn't written more such material. I find his overall impressions of the food-related world and its sometimes quirky inhabitants to be quite revealing and true to my own limited experience. Seldom are we exposed to scenes behind the public persona. Chefs are gifted people, and unfortunately some are troubled with difficult personalities. Olney's portrayal of people-with-palate and their world is unapologetically his own: insightful, frank and touching. He does not hesitate to include his own opinion - an aspect of his writing I find refreshing and many times laugh-out-loud amusing. His food-wine pairings are inspired. I truly dreaded the approaching end of this book. I had come to read the text as a small yet intimate peek into an artist's life. The last pages brought great emptyness, as if I had lost a friend. 'Reflexions' is a great read and is now part of my permanent collection, no doubt to be revisited again.

Rating:
Summary: a somewhat lonely and disappointed life
Review: There is really only one good reason to read this book, which is if you are seriously interested in post-war French food and wine (and the associated culture), and for that purpose it contains an enormous wealth of information.

If you want to know more about Richard Olney (as I also did), you may be unsatisfied. The impression the book gives is of a very private man who never really reveals himself and who was in the end disappointed by life. Also, the writing is, to be honest, not really up to the standards that he sets in his other books: this reads more like a draft than a finished book, which it may very well be, since he died before publishing it - but even so, I suspect that he was simply not very comfortable with autobiography as a genre.

While he is, for instance, perfectly frank, and even quite charming about his sexuality (the episode with Auden and the little pots of jam is worth, by itself, the price), you never learn, for instance, what his conservative middle class, middle-american parents thought (or if they knew). Neither, for that matter, do you ever find out how he earned his living (yes, life was cheaper, but a cellar full of Romanee-Conte and 60 year old d'Yquem must be based on some sort of income).

I found the most touching parts to be about his friendship with Elizabeth David, and that is maybe revealing, since she was another loner (or simply lonely)...

Rating:
Summary: "The best palate on the planet"
Review: This is a wonderful, deeply moving, highly informative, chronicle and gastronomic autobiography, based mainly on letters and menus, supplemented by personal memories. It will not find a large audience, but for those interested in French food and wine, and especially in Olney himself, it should be owned and will be treasured.

Richard Olney was a highly sensitive Iowa boy who intended to be an expatriot portrait painter in France, but became instead one of the world's most authoritative tasters, writers and thinkers about French cuisine and wines. He had, simply, the best palate on the planet; he wrote beautifully and precisely about taste, cooking, and winemaking; he lived eccentrically in the south of France all his adult life; he was slowly discovered by the French, British, and American food establishments, knew everyone therein and was clearly loved and admired by the best of them; thus he gained a devoted following and immense influence through his many books. This book is unfinished; Olney died suddenly of a heart attack in August, 1999.

Olney's critiques of Julia Child, James Beard, M.F.K. Fisher, and even Craig Claiborne; and his adoring friendships with Simone Beck, Elizabeth David, Kermit Lynch, Lulu Peyraud and many others; are carefully and reliably described, always on the basis of evidence. The exhaustive details of memorable meals--e.g., pairings of food and wine--are richly informative and edifying for knowledgeable and experienced readers (which his cookbook readers are). People who are not already interested in these subjects probably will not find enough other material to justify buying this book.