Review of “What I Ate in a Year” by Stanley Tucci – one bite too many? | Autobiography and memoirs

I I have to admit that I was a bit surprised by the release of Stanley Tucci's latest book. If I were to write on such a subject, the result would be as great as that of Samuel Richardson Clarissa or a Victorian family Bible fit only to be wheeled around on a small cart. However, its effort is quite noticeable externally, and when you open it there is plenty of empty space. Add to that the advisory subtitle “And Related Thoughts” (oh, so there are some general speeches as well as reflections on breakfast, lunch and dinner), and even before you start reading, the buffet seems a little decimated be.

What I ate in a year is in the form of a diary. When it opens in January 2023, Tucci, a Golden Globe- and Emmy-winning actor, has just arrived in Rome to film conclavea papal thriller based on the novel by Robert Harris. He's already missing his wife and kids and finds himself living in a less-than-hospitable apartment hotel – an experience that's unfortunately part and parcel of life on the road for filmmaking (although someone from production has at least equipped his kitchen with it). pasta, canned tomatoes and new knives). But whatever. On the plus side, there are his co-stars. One of them is Isabella Rossellini, who takes him to a restaurant her mother, Ingrid Bergman, loved, where a host of nuns sing hymns to guests as they eat. Another is Ralph Fiennes, with whom Tucci – these sensitive guys – shares a preference for the softer, less tannic red wines of the Italian north.

This would be a good start for any book. Isabella Rossellini! Ralph Fiennes! And the reader is also immediately reminded of Tucci's special charm, which has to do not only with his modesty and wit, but also with the fact that he balances fame and normality so skillfully and cleverly (many well-known actors, if not most). , can't or don't want to pull off this trick). He enjoys traveling by train; he eats alone in restaurants; He doesn't expect any special treatment from the waiters. It's endearing to know that he always brings his own food on set, expecting the catering to be dishearteningly bad, and his tastes are mostly basic. Among the longings he describes in What I ate in a year is for a dandelion leaf salad, a dish that reminds him of his childhood, when the Italian immigrants from Westchester, New York, collected them along the parkways leading to Manhattan (while Tucci now lives in west London, his American parents) . are of Italian descent).

But after that it goes steeply downhill. Tucci has already written three best-selling books about food, and at this point I feel like he has little more to say – at least on the subject. How often do we need to hear how much he loves marinara sauce? Or artichokes? Or eggplant? There are only so many ways to say something is delicious. This volume devotes a lot of space to the food in airport lounges and (I assume) the business class cabins of airplanes, and while these passages are very boring indeed, they are not as yawn-inducing as the parts about security checks and delayed flights (personally, I would only be inclined to read a five-and-a-half-page report on a round-trip flight to Aspen if it were from a real genius like Craig Brown or Geoff Dyer – and I'd still get a drink first pour). Tucci has designed a line of cookware that's fine with me even if I'm not looking for a celebrity colander. But writing about it here makes it seem sleazy, whatever his intentions.

Occasional mentions include famous friends like Jamie Dornan, Saoirse Ronan and Harry Styles (who apparently likes the poet Rilke), all coming to dinner; Tucci and his brother-in-law, actor John Krasinski, spend a day off at Guy Ritchie's country house and it's like something out of Ritchie's (dark) Netflix series. The gentlemen. But he is always calm around other people. In June he has dinner with Colin Firth and Tom Ford at the River Cafe in London. “What we discussed is none of your business,” he writes, which strikes me as a somewhat invigorating approach to the reader relationship. If you don't want to invade other people's privacy, why bother publishing a diary at all? Of course, I think I know the answer to this question (and you probably do too). But as someone who has written for a living for more than two decades, I have to squeeze a little lemon here. The impulses contained throughout this book strike me as depressingly cynical, as it is thinner than freshly rolled fettuccine.