The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, August 2013: The premise sounds far-fetched, even a little silly: While proofreading a deli catalog in Michigan, Michael Paterniti is bewitched by a description of cave-aged Spanish cheese; years later, disillusioned with modern life and his own “computer-soft hands,” he travels to its Spanish back-country source, where he becomes obsessed with its larger-than-life maker and his story of soul-stealing cheese-related betrayal. But don’t get too cynical (or annoyed by the sprawling footnotes) too fast, or you’ll miss the earth-stained magic of this story. Yes, Paterniti can be a hyperbolic virtuoso, “given to tilting the most quotidian events into a Viking epic”--or a Castillian tragedy. He even opens with this quote from Pascal: “Imagination magnifies small objects with fantastic exaggeration until they fill our soul.” But these “small objects,” en masse, do become soul-filling until Paterniti’s life-altering epiphany in a moonlit field of sunflowers seems like an essential human experience. This transportive culinary memoir will launch a thousand gastronomical pilgrimages. --Mari Malcolm