Cursed Bread

November 1, 2022

In 1951, the residents of the French village of Pont-Saint-Esprit seems collectively to have lost their minds, an event that some historians have attributed to fungus-infected bread. Mackintosh, author of the Man Booker long-listed The Water Cure, reveals her own ideas in her first historical, which centers on the taut relationship between baker's wife Elodie and the new-in-town ambassador and his wife. With a 40,000-copy first printing.

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February 13, 2023
In the intense but muddled latest from Mackintosh (Cursed Bread), a pent-up woman falls for a set of newcomers to her remote French village a few years after WWII. The narrator, 30-something Elodie, anachronistically calls herself “matron-adjacent” compared to the younger sexed-up Violet, who arrives with her unnamed husband. Elodie’s husband, a baker, won’t have sex with her, and her longing is heightened after a party when she overhears Violet’s husband tell her “I know you want to fuck him” (about Elodie’s husband), and “If you eat the bread, you’ll die.” The idea of another woman wanting Elodie’s husband excites her, as does the virility of Violet’s own husband, and before it’s all over, Elodie comes close to sleeping with both. Along the way, she exchanges gossip with neighbors, and flash-forwards anticipate a wave of madness and deaths in the town. An author’s note alludes to inspiration from a mass poisoning in 1951 Pont-Sant-Esprit, but Mackintosh’s account remains gauzy; though the cause of the deaths is revealed at the end, big questions remain, including whether Violet and her husband are figments of Elodie’s imagination. Though evocative at first, the riffs on desire grow repetitive and fail to illuminate the material. This is a misfire.

March 1, 2023
A baker's widow processes grief, obsession, and desire for the enigmatic couple who may have caused a townwide poisoning. Elodie spends her days kneading loaves, selling bread to the members of her insular French village, and washing clothes in the communal lavoir. Her husband is obsessed with creating the perfect loaf of bread, and she tries unsuccessfully to rekindle their old spark. "I can admit that in those days I was sometimes jealous of the dough my husband put his hands into, worked so tenderly and tirelessly with, up to the elbows," Elodie recalls. The baker and his wife may always have fresh food at hand, but Elodie is starved for affection. When an American ambassador and his glamorous wife, Violet, arrive to great fanfare, Elodie is unexpectedly enraptured by them both. At the couple's housewarming party, Elodie overhears the ambassador warn Violet away from the food. "If you eat the bread, you'll die, he said, and it sounded more like a caress than a threat." So begins a hallucinogenic fairy tale, based on a real-life mass poisoning, in which the lines between Elodie's desire for Violet and her desire for Violet's life warp and blur. Mackintosh alternates between Elodie's memories of Violet's arrival and her letters to Violet, which reveal the darkness, longing, and abjection that have consumed Elodie in the year after the tragedy. The effect is jittery and destabilizing, heightening the horrors of mass death--and intimate cruelty--when they finally arrive. "I have been the most myself in these moments of shame, drawn inexorably down into myself, everything in my body in alignment," Elodie writes to Violet. "What I am trying to tell you is that when you finally get your face into the dirt, it can feel like a relief." Propelled by Mackintosh's singular lyricism, this strange, unsettling novel--enigmatic to the last--never quite coheres.

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March 1, 2023
In her third novel, Mackintosh (The Water Cure, 2019; Blue Ticket, 2020) departs from dystopian fiction, instead transporting readers to a small town in post-WWII France. Elodie has tried to inure herself to her baker husband's inattention, but his distance primes her for the arrival of a mysterious ambassador and his beautiful wife, Violet. They cast an exotic spell over the town, but Elodie quickly senses a dark and perhaps violent undercurrent in the new couple. Elodie's need for excitement propels her toward Violet, whose tragic air functions as a sort of aphrodisiac for Elodie, but nothing is clear in this story. The novel reads like a mystery viewed through a haze of lust and misdirection, a sort of Body Heat (the eighties erotic thriller) meets Agatha Christie. Elodie may remind some readers of a more blatantly carnal descendant of Emma Bovary. The denouement is based upon a real-life tragedy in a small French town, but readers won't find any real answers to that mystery here. They will, however, find Mackintosh's incantatory prose as hypnotic as ever.

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