What better setting than the dinner party for a social satire about taste? In this short comic novel, Austrian author Teresa Präauer transforms a typical bourgeois Viennese Abendessen into a raucous chamber play that surfaces the status anxieties, repressed desires and cultural snobberies of a handful of forty-something Europeans.
Her characters namedrop female jazz artists, debate identity politics, boast about exotic food experiences, and talk about big show-offish books they haven’t read; each is, in their own way, addicted to their smartphone. As the dinner party proceeds, disagreements and hypocrisies bubble up to the surface. Things get heated – and then they get weird.
The result is one part Thomas Bernhard and one part Phoebe Waller-Bridge, with a pinch of Luis Buñuel. Präauer is both witty and wise; she has a gift for sharp dialogue. Yet her satire is more searching than savage. At its heart is the party’s unnamed hostess, who – even as she follows social norms – delivers moments of striking profundity and emotional depth, especially when reflecting on gendered expectations and family inheritance.
“Food,” she mulls at one point, “has always contained the history of a country, and its present.” So, in a sense, does this novel.
- Cooking in the Wrong Century by Teresa Präauer (trans. Eleanor Updegraff) is available now from Pushkin Press, details.
