I I have to admit that I was a bit surprised by the appearance of Stanley Tucci's latest book. If I write on such a theme the effect is the size of Samuel Richardson Clarissa Or a Victorian family Bible, fit only to carry around in a small pram. However, his effort has a very discreet perimeter on the outside, and when you open it up, white is revealed. Add to this the advice verse “and related thoughts” (ah, so there's some general pontificating, as well as comments about breakfast, lunch and dinner) and, before you've even started reading, the buffet is off to a tangent.
What I ate in a year Takes the form of a diary. When it opens in January 2023, Doocy, a Golden Globe and Emmy Award-winning actor, has arrived in Rome for filming. ConferenceA papal thriller based on the novel by Robert Harris. Already missing his wife and children, he finds himself in a not-so-hospitable apartment hotel – an experience that, alas, is an integral part of life on the road making a movie (although one of the production crew has at least stocked his kitchen with pasta, tinned tomatoes and fresh knives). But that's okay. It is an added advantage to have actors with him. One is Isabella Rossellini, who is taken by her mother, Ingrid Bergman, to a fancy restaurant where overbearing nuns sing carols to them as they dine. Another is Ralph Fiennes, with whom Ducci shares a preference – these passionate fellows – for the smooth, less tannic red wines of the Italian north.
For any book, this would be a good start. Isabella Rossellini! Ralph Fiennes! Immediately, the reader is reminded of Tusi's particular charm, which is related not only to his modesty and intelligence, but also to his smooth and clever balancing of fame and naturalness (many famous actors. , could not – or did not want to) pull this trick. He likes to travel by train; He eats alone in restaurants; He did not expect special treatment from the staff. It's nice to know that he always takes his own food on set, catering is pretty bad, and his tastes are often simple. In longings he describes what i ate In one year A salad of dandelion leaves, a dish reminiscent of his childhood, was when Italian immigrants from Westchester, New York, would collect them from the parkways leading to Manhattan (Ducci now lives in West London, where his American parents are of Italian descent).
But after this, we are going downhill hard. Tucci has already written three best-selling food books, and my feeling is that he should have a little more to say on the subject. How many times do we have to ask how much he likes marinara sauce? Or artichoke? Or eggplant? There are only so many ways to say delicious. A lot of space is reserved in this block for food in airport lounges and in business class cabins of planes. About security checks and delayed flights (personally, I'd rather read a five-and-a-half-page account of a plane tour of Aspen by bona fide geniuses like Craig Brown or Jeff Dyer – I'd still pour a drink first). Doocy designs a variety of cookware that looks good to me, even if I'm not in the market for a fancy colander. But when he writes about it here, whatever his intention is, it looks ugly.
Occasionally, there are hints of famous friends like Jamie Dornan, Saoirse Ronan and Harry Styles (the poet loves Rilke, apparently), who all come to dinner; Tucci and her brother-in-law, actor John Krasinski, spent a day at Guy Ritchie's country house, which looks like nothing on Ritchie's Netflix series. Gentleman. But he is always bitter about others. In June, she had dinner with Colin Firth and Tom Ford at the River Cafe in London. “What we talked about is none of your business,” he writes, which strikes me as a somewhat bold approach to reader relations. Why bother publishing a diary if you don't want to invade anyone's privacy? Naturally, I think I know the answer to this question (and you probably do too). But as someone who has written for his entire career spanning more than two decades, I have to squeeze some lemonade here. The prompts in this book feel depressingly cynical on all sides to me because it's thinner than freshly rolled fettuccine.
