DISCOVERIES

“I didn’t want to speak of my father,” Mary Gordon, author of a previous memoir, “The Shadow Man,” as well as the novel “The Company of Women,” catches herself digressing from this memoir’s supposed goal. “I wanted to be talking about places. I wanted spaces emptied of people; I wanted to mention lights and shadows, eloquent emptiness, the melancholy of furniture, the loneliness of ceilings.” Nonetheless, it’s a ghost story: the ghosts of her strong, matriarchal grandmother and her nine children in the house on Long Island, where patterns of neglect insinuated themselves into every relationship; the ghosts of her parents in the apartment they shared for little more than a decade until Gordon’s father’s death; and, for me most poignant, the ghost of her own happy self in a house in Truro on Cape Cod that she rented for eight blissful summers but could not afford to buy when the opportunity arose.

When a memoir is well-told, rich with detail, as this one is, the things and people in it remain truly unique in the writer’s memory; neater explanations would be fiction. Gordon’s words are like ingredients in a recipe; you must add them together to taste the final result. *

THE FLY-TRUFFLER; By Gustaf Sobin; W.W. Norton: 160 pp., $19.95

Cabassac, Gustaf Sobin’s Don Quixote, is a fiftysomething professor of linguistics living in the farmhouse he grew up in in Provence. Mid-November to March each year, he hunts the flies that lay their eggs on truffles and gathers the truffles. He falls in love with a student half his age, Julieta, whose features are “Alpine Provencal. . . . [E]verything about her, Cabassac recognized, was redolent of altitude. . . . Even her inherent austerity . . . spoke of rocks and cascades, of wild, resinous stands of pinewood.” Together, they interview and record the language of peasants and silkworm farmers and sheepherders in Haute Provence. When she dies, Cabassac finds that eating truffles makes him dream of her. He enters a dream life with Julieta that takes over his waking life entirely. In the truffle-dreams, they make love; Julieta becomes pregnant and together they prepare the house for their new family. It’s an oddly gentle, wintry little novel, with a gorgeous primeval landscape; gentle and sad, hopeful for death.

THE BEST THING I EVER TASTED; By Sallie Tisdale; Riverhead Books: 312 pp., $25.95

“I quit writing this chapter a few hours ago,” Sallie Tisdale, contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine and author of “Talk Dirty to Me,” writes, “to cook dinner for my family. I didn’t really want to stop writing, but I said I would cook tonight, and hardly anyone else in my household ever does.” This is not the cheerful voice of Martha Stewart, or the blowzy voice of Julia Child, or Laurie Colwin, stern defender of the family meal, or M.F.K. Fisher, life-loving practical gourmet. Tisdale tries to puzzle out where she fits in the museum of kitchen-queen-motherhood, remembering her own mothers grit-toothed hatred of domesticity. For the faint of stomach, it may prove hard to follow Tisdale into her most introspective moments (which usually involve Campbell’s soup). Consider it an anti-cookbook, a gross-out cookbook, complete with memories of fritters, Velveeta with white bread and Miracle Whip that could make anyone run from food and motherhood.

A REPORTER AT LARGE; Dateline: Pyramid Lake, Nevada; By A.J. Liebling Edited by Elmer R. Rusco; University of Nevada Press: 140 pp., $12.95 paper

For those who love him, each new publication of A.J. Liebling’s writings for The New Yorker is a cause for celebration. This volume collects under one roof four pieces published in 1955 as a series called “The Lake of the Cui-Ui Eaters.” In 1949, Liebling went to Nevada to obtain a divorce from his first wife. Rather than stay in Reno, he moved to the Pyramid Lake Ranch, a dude ranch for divorcees, and the cast of characters--the women, the children and the Paiute Indians who work there--is beyond hilarious. “I have never been reluctant to buy a lady a drink,” he writes, “but there were thirty-eight ladies in residence at the ranch, and this offered a problem in economics.” “My cringing amiability reminded them of their husbands. . . . I turtled my head between my shoulders and dined from a slight crouch. . . .” Liebling becomes interested in the Indians’ fight with some white settlers over their land, over the cui’ui fish that only live in Pyramid Lake and which the Paiutes depend on. Liebling can make a senate bill amusing. No wonder he has been compared to a tall glass of dry champagne.