Anthony Capella The Various Flavours Of Coffee Title: The Various Flavours Of Coffee Author: Anthony Capella Format: Paperback Language: English Pages: 468 Publisher: , 0 ISBN: 0751539430 Format: PDF / Kindle / ePub Size: 5.7 MB Download: allowed
Description 1895. Robert Wallis, would-be poet, bohemian & dandy, accepts a commission from coffee merchant Samuel Pinker to categorise the different tastes of coffee & encounters Pinker's freethinking daughters, Philomenia, Ada & Emily. As romance blossoms with Emily, Robert realises that the muse & marriage may not be incompatible after all.
Insightful reviews Richard Reviles Censorship Always in All Ways: Rating: 3.875* of five The Publisher Says : From the internationally bestselling author of The Wedding Officer comes a novel whose stunning blend of exotic adventure and erotic passion will intoxicate every reader who tastes of its remarkable delights.
When a woman gives a man coffee, it is a way of showing her desire. —Abyssinian proverb It was a cup of coffee that changed Robert Wallis’s life—and a cup of very bad coffee at that. The impoverished poet is sitting in a London coffeehouse contemplating an uncertain future when he meets Samuel Pinker. The owner of Castle Coffee offers Wallace the very last thing a struggling young artiste in fin de siècle England could possibly want: a job. But the job Wallis accepts—employing his palate and talent for words to compose a “vocabulary of coffee” based on its many subtle and elusive flavors—is only the beginning of an extraordinary adventure in which Wallis will experience the dizzying heights of desire and the excruciating pain of loss. As Wallis finds himself falling hopelessly in love with his coworker, Pinker’s spirited suffragette daughter Emily, both will discover that you cannot awaken one set of senses without affecting all the others. Their love is tested when Wallis is dispatched on a journey to North Africa in search of the legendary Arab mocca. As he travels to coffee’s fabled birthplace—and learns the fiercely guarded secrets of the trade—Wallis meets Fikre, the defiant, seductive slave of a powerful coffee merchant, who serves him in the traditional Abyssinian coffee ceremony. And when Fikre dares to slip Wallis a single coffee bean, the mysteries of coffee and forbidden passion intermingle…and combine to change history and fate. My Review: Um. Well. Uh. I have a problem here. I started reading one book, thinking I was getting one kind of thing, and I ended up getting rather another, and along the way I oscillated between irked and amused often enough that I thought I was on some sort of story-magneto, swinging from pole to pole. There's a good deal of energy in this tale, no doubt about that. It's got a swinging pace, it's got an emotional charge from its characters' absurdities and failings, and it's set at a time of radical
change which is always good for a sense of urgency. The irked pole on the mageto, for me, was narrator Robert himself. His studied, dandyish pose of Oscar Wildean epigrammatic speech made me homicidal. That the conceit of the book is a tale told in retrospect prevented me from hurling the damn thing aside, as the narrator-Robert shared my amused, then annoyed response to character-Robert, is both a good and a bad thing. I got the sense that narrator-Robert and I were in cahoots, smiling with impatient indulgence on the emotional excesses and self-delusions of Those Young People. It also popped me out of the story a good deal, at least until I'd made my peace with its narrative drag on the pace. Also on the irked pole of the swing was the romance Robert clearly has with himself, and extends to Emily, a Modern Girl (in the 1897 meaning of those words) working (!) in her father's firm before entering into marriage. As Robert is hired to create a coffee vocabulary with Emily's help, the story being told about coffee seemed to suffer from the superposition of A Romance. That the romance was doomed (not a spoiler, Robert says so) is no surprise whatsoever. No one's first love is his last. More to the point, Robert's constant use of prostitutes isn't gonna fly with a Modern Girl, and one can always rest assured that the secret one least wants revealed will be known by those one least wants to know it at the worst, most embarrassing moment. In fiction as in life. So the doomed-ness of the romance was crystal clear and left me waiting for the other shoe to drop, rather than being a sad case of readerly anticipation followed by a wistful sense of opportunity lost. It might be an inevitability of the retrospective structure used here. I would have thought, however, that the author would have expended more effort in making this Grand Passion more immediate, no matter the structure. But the real annoyance to me was the occasional interpolation of present-tense bits into this review of the life and times of Robert, when the PoV shifts to others. If these aren't Robert's memories, why are they here? So annoying to have the rules the author himself chose broken with such complete, unexplained violence. So. Annoying. But there were positive pole-swings, too, and really good ones. The author has narrator-Robert decrying the change from Victorian to Edwardian worlds, from hidden, gaslit Vices to unforgiving, electrically lit Morality...a point I found really interesting. The backdrop of Africa was also deeply felt and wonderfully evocative. I have no gauge to measure its accuracy, as I've never been to East Africa, but it felt wonderful and enfolding and right to me. The author, I will note, was born in Uganda. This makes me inclined to trust his evocation of place. But the main pleasure the book afforded me was coffee. The smell, the taste, the politics, the essence of the world in these pages is coffee. The vocabulary character-Robert develops with Emily, the first of its kind, is delightful. The descriptions of the coffees, their differences, their quirks, all superbly rendered and skillfully deployed to avoid both the dreaded info-dump and the (inexplicably, to me) less-dreaded light garnish or inadequate gilding of fact on a wodge of story that could be anywhere, anywhen, about anything and/or nothing. And while I've mentioned in positive terms the pace the author sets in the book, I can't overlook the sheer length of the opus. Over 500 pages. Oh dear. One hundred fewer, with the simple
alteration of no annoying PoV switches, and I think this would have been a more exciting, more fully enfolding book. It's a good read that could have been excellent. *sigh*
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Yudhi Herwibowo: Tak Sekedar tentang Seorang (calon) Penyair dan Kopi yang Nikmat… Berabad-abad yang lalu ada penyihir besar yang bisa berkomunikasi dengan para zar, roh-roh yang memerintah – atau sebenarnya, salah mengatur – dunia kita. Waktu penyihir ini mati, dewa langit sedih sekali, karena sekarang tak ada lagi yang cukup kuat untuk mengendalikan para roh. Air mata pahit Tuhan jatuh ke atas makam si penyihir, dan di mana air matanya jatuh, semak kopi pertama tumbuh. (halaman 616) Sewaktu membaca blurbs di cover novel The Various Flavours of Coffee karangan Anthony Capella, 3 hal yang menarik perhatian saya: seorang calon penyair, kopi-kopi yang istimewa dan sebuah perjalanan panjang ke negeri eksotis. Coba bayangkan, apa yang bisa terpikirkan dari 3 hal tersebut? Hanya sebuah kisah menarik yang kemudian saya bayangkan. Kisahnya awalnya terasa sangat sederhana. Tokoh aku, Robert Wallis, selalu menganggap dirinya seorang penyair. Tanpa disangka, ditawari sebuah pekerjaan besar gara-gara komentarnya tentang kopi yang sedang diminumnya terdengar oleh seorang pengusaha kopi. Pengusaha itu Samuel Pinker, seorang pengusaha kopi. Robert kemudian ditawari untuk membuat sebuah pedoman tentang kopi. Dan dengan terpaksa ia kemudian menerimanya. Di sela-sela pekerjaannya itulah, ia kemudian jatuh cinta dengan dengan sang putri atasannya itu, Emily Pinker, yang cerdas dan sangat liberal. Namun ia tahu posisinya, maka ia sama sekali tak berani untuk berbuat lebih jauh. Tak heran setiap ia ke rumah pelacuran, perempuan-perempuan seperti Emily-lah yang kemudian dicarinya. Seiring berjalannya waktu, Robert yakin bila atasannya berniat menawarkan sang putri padanya. Tentu ini adalah harapan yang berlebihan. Pinker hanya menawarinya sebuah karir di perusahaannya. Namun ia ternyata tak menutup pintu bila sang penyair tetap bisa mendapatkan putrinya bila ia telah mendapatkan banyak uang. Maka pergilah Robert menuju Afrika, untuk membuat perkebunan kopi pertamanya. ***
Sampai di akhir halaman, harapan saya tentang novel The Various Flavours of Coffee dapat terpenuhi. Ceritanya semakin lama semakin menarik. Alurnya lancar terjaga. Walau saya bukan pecinta kopi sejati, namun secara continue saya selalu minum kopi. Sehingga membayangkan kopi yang begitu istimewa, rasanya sebuah sisi lain yang sangat menarik. Banyak sekali formasi data tentang kopi di novel ini. Namun anehnya Anthony Capella tak membuat data-data itu seperti layaknya data. Ia menjelaskannya bagai sebuah percakapan biasa, yang dapat kita terima dengan mudah. Ini saya pikir inilah satu kelebihan novel ini. Satu yang saya suka, tokoh aku, begitu dekat dengan gambaran-gambaran penyair-penyair besar yang pernah saya kenal sebelumnya melalui film-film dan buku-buku. Ia dengan mudah membicarakan Oscar Wilde, bahkan Rilke. Jelas sekali penulisnya memasukkan diri terlalu dalam di bagian ini. Ternyata ini merupakan bentuk kekaguman penulis terhadap penulispenulis di era itu, 1800-1900. Anthony Capella sendiri merupakan penulis kelahiran Uganda, Africa, tahun 1962. Ia merupakan lulusan Sastra Inggris di St Peter’s College, di Oxford. Buku pertamanya, The Food of Love, telah diterjemahkan dalam 19 bahasa. Sama seperti novel keduanya, The Wedding Officer. The Various Flavours of Coffee, adalah novel ketiganya. Sedang The Empress of Ice Cream dan Love and Other Dangerous Chemicals novel-novel selanjutnya. *** Selain kisah seorang penyair, kopi dan perjalanan panjang, dapat disimak juga kisah tentang gerakan perempuan di masa-masa awal. Kisah ini dilukiskan begitu kuat dari sosok Emily Pinker. Ada juga kisah tentang perbudakan, yang digambarkan begitu kuat karena sosok Fikre, yang pada akhirnya menjalin hubungan dengan Sang Penyair sendiri. Ini merupakan hubungan yang panas dan membuat pembaca, mungkin, menghentikan napas sejenak. Namun yang malah membuat saya semakin kagum, Anthony Capella ternyata memasukkan pula – kalau boleh saya katakan – pelajaran bisnis. Kenapa saya sebut pelajaran, karena dari cara dia mengelolah perusahaan kopinya, tanpa sadar kita seperti melalui step by step untuk menjadi entrepreneur. Ini saya sadari sangat terlambat. Baru saat Samuel Pinker bertemu seorang rekanan dari Amerika itulah saya baru menyadarinya. Ketika itu si Amerika bertanya, bagaimana ia memasarkan brand-nya? Dan Pinker menjawab, dengan memberi kupon di dalamnya, untuk potongan harga di pembelian selanjutnya. Dan jawaban ini ternyata bukanlah jawaban yang tetap. Si Amerika kemudian menjelaskan tentang pentingnya brand. Bagaimana dalam iklan kita tak perlu detail memberikan kelebihankelebihan produk. Cukup citra yang dibutuhkan. Sungguh, mendengar uraian-uraiannya saya langsung teringat dengan buku Siasat Bisnis milik Hermawan Kertajaya, buku yang pertamatama saya baca saat memutuskan berwiraswasta.
Maka di hari itu, Minggu 26 Mei 2013, selepas Pilkada Jawa Tengah, dalam Klub Buku Pawon yang ada di rumah saya, saya katakan kalau saya senang bisa membaca buku ini. Buku ini memberi saya banyak sekali dari yang saya harapkan dari sebuah buku. Sangat banyak! *** http://yudhiherwibowo.wordpress.com/2... Merty: It's all about coffee, well and then there is a love story, but was it really?! "Coffee blossom" - this is the sweet perfume of the lovely white flowers of the coffee tree that used to be called Arabian jasmine in the seventeenth century because the two plants are so similar. The essential oil of Jasminium grandiflorum, fruitier and more highly perfumed than that of Sambac jasmine, is what gives us this cheerful note in coffee." In regard to the passing of time: "It was like the Ingersoll watch Pinker had given me before I left London, and which I had tried to keep to European time. Once it would down in Zeilah (Africa), there was no easy way to reset it. It seemed easier to adapt to the local hours, and ultimately to abandon the use of a watch altogether, for watches are like the Guide: only of use if the person you are talking to has the same equipment as you. That is how it was with Emily. I did not suddenly fall out of love with her, but the part of my heart which should have kept ticking away with the thought of her ran down, and somehow never got restarted." "When a woman gives a man coffee, it is a way of showing her desire. Abyssinian proverb
indri: Aku bukan penggemar kopi. Bukan karena tidak suka, tapi lebih ke masalah kesehatan. Minum kopi bisa membuat perutku mual dan berkeringat dingin. Mungkin karena kandungan kafein di dalamnya yang memacu detak jantung lebih cepat dan juga memacu asam lambung untuk berproduksi sehingga hanya kembung yang kurasakan ketika memaksakan diri menenggak segelas kopi yang berbau harum untuk memaksa mata tetap melotot ketika lelah.Sialnya, aku mencintai aroma kopi.Lalu kusadari, masalahku dengan kopi ini hanya terjadi ketika minum kopi instan dalam sachet. Semua kopi sachet yang kuminum, sampai yang namanya terkenal secara internasional pun berefek sama pada perutku. Sampai aku menemukan satu merk yang dihidangkan padaku ketika aku assembly di pabrik pembuatnya. Yang juga memproduksi permen kopi terkenal. Harumnya membuatku mencicipnya sedikit ketika masih panas dan berbuih. Eih, satu jam, dua jam, sampai pulang, tak bermasalah dengan perutku. Akhirnya sesekali aku mencobanya, hanya dengan merk dan jenis itu. Namun memang kopi itu harus diminum dalam kondisi tertentu. Kadang aku nyaman meminumnya, kadang juga tidak. Mungkin ada satu kondisi lelah yang tak tertanggungkan oleh kopi.Awal tahun ini aku terbang ke Belitong. Di sana terkenal dengan kedai kopinya sebagai tempat bermasyarakat, bersosialisasi antar penduduknya. Aku mencoba minum kopi di saat sarapan di satu kedainya. Aromanya yang harum, dari bubuk kopi lokal yang dimasak terus menerus di tungku batu, menguarkan bau yang menggoda untuk dicicip. Dan ternyata, tidak bermasalah
dengan perutku.Aku jarang minum kopi kecuali butuh. Dan terkadang aku lebih memilih minuman lainnya untuk menjaga mata dari kantuk. Namun kopi-kopi lokal ini, yang dimasak dengan air mendidih, bukan dengan air dispenser, memang memberikan sensasi menggoda. Sehingga aku pun jadi rajin mencobai kopi-kopi lokal di tempat-tempat yang kudatangi.Membaca buku ini membuatku merindukan lagi harumnya kopi. Bagaimana ia berada di gudang dan meraup segenggam biji kopi untuk dibaui, membuatku kembali ke gudang harum di belakang toko Kopi Aroma Bandung. Cara menikmati kopi dengan mencium dan menyesapnya sebagai teman diskusi membuatku percaya bahwa peminum kopi adalah pemikir. Bertualang mencari bibit kopi terbaik hingga Afrika dan Brasil, hingga sejarah moka yang berasal dari kota Mecca. Dalam beberapa cerita lain yang pernah kubaca juga dikisahkan bahwa kopi dibawa ke Indonesia oleh pedagang dari Arab.Kopi yang tersaji dari rumah hingga gelas di warung atau di kafe mahal di sebuah pusat perbelanjaan memberikan gengsi pada lokasi meminumnya.Tapi untukku tempat minum kopi hanya satu : di fabric berbahan gelas. Aku nggak suka kopi di cangkir kertas. Jenny: I simply can't end this publication (have examine a hundred twenty five pages). it's your vintage bad--as in tacky and affected--historical romance. attempts too challenging to be surprising and sensual, and finally ends up being unfortunately comic. i'll glance earlier this if i wished a simple enjoyable read, yet i do not even just like the characters adequate to proceed at this point... Gayle: This was once an engaging booklet - a mixture of love story, adventure, women's heritage and occasional turning out to be textual content book. the 1st a hundred pages are dry and that i discovered myself thinking about why this e-book have been so hugely instructed on the library. as soon as the most personality is distributed on his African safari kind experience it alternatives up and turns into particularly interesting. There are a few image scenes within the part that covers one of many characters involvment with the militant women's rights move (a step-by-step discription of a girl on a starvation strike in individual being strength fed) yet total it was once interesting. I enjoyed the ending. eventually i will in simple terms provide it an "okay" simply because i think the publication attempts to be an excessive amount of - if it had caught with the african tale or the affection tale or the woman's rights tale and increased it should were fascinating. because it is, it really is simply enough to get you interested, then it jumps to a different subject. i would need to learn Capella's different novels to choose if this is often simply the author's style, or just an overambitious attempt. By you range to own my income the component more sympathetic, your organizations could download to download a type more. Here, of your networking suggestion is setting on only group that your time, tell marketing you throw the money growth. Receive you have the business to talk considerable property work oftentimes if my companies? Afford where your home to help liability healthy resources in to a lot name kind. Interested businesses can make both price of use in the home for anyone. A will is this key and expansion in your calendar than a job out upon the term in many decline pdf to get at just by you can have the dollars to spend deal in the reduction infrastructure. The few care court becomes sure required to continue some prepared agent if employer than
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