I found myself reading The Fly-Truffler twice, first for the sheer beauty of the prose and the sweet, haunting sadness of the story, and second for the art of fly-truffling.
My first reading came after a rich and savory dinner. The Fly-Truffler was like a soft and creamy French Brie denoting a finale to that luxurious meal. Read in the descending light of a warm summer evening, it evoked images that enchanted and mesmerized. It was like the richest of desserts that lingered long after the plate had been emptied. It was like sipping Benedictine, single cask, oak aged, created in Normandy in the north of France, warm and wonderful, followed by an ice water back.
Claude Monet's Garden:
an inviting place to read The Fly-Truffler.
Copyrighted in 1999 by a US born poet and author who chose to live many years in France, this slim novel didn't come to my attention until recently. Fly-truffling, what's that, I wondered as I examined its cover. In the hands of Gustaf Sobin, I quickly learned that on one hand fly-truffling is a passion and an obsession, a way of tying together reality and hallucinations via exquisite vocabulary. On the other hand, fly-truffling is the art of stalking flies that lay their eggs directly over the bedded truffle.
Sobin explains the art of fly-truffling sporadically and yet in detail throughout the written pages, and always eloquently as evidenced in these brief passages:
As often the case, that late-summer thunderstorm was followed by an unabated blast of mistral. Often called the "mud-eater," it dried, even crackled the surface of the earth. Within a matter of days, the topsoil grew as parched as a desert floor. Cabassac read this as a kind of signal. A geomorphic clue. Given the extent of the truffle's inordinate growth rate immediately following that late-summer thunderstorm, its rapid swelling blistered the surface of the earth a full twenty, thirty, even forty centimeters overhead. It left what is called a ped-de-poulo or chicken-claw imprint upon the earth's surface. Putting a handful of barley seeds in his pocket, he went out onto those abandoned terraces of his, following the line between the oak woods on one side and the dead almond, cherry, and apricot orchards on the other. Whenever he came upon one of those ped-de-poulo, he dropped barley seed into its very center, then moved on to the next.
That morning, he spotted and marked well over a dozen such sites. Within weeks, he knew, the early-autumn rains would have effaced those chicken-claw imprints, choked their tiny crevices with running silt. By then, though, those barley seeds would have sprouted, leaving - each time - a thin little pennant of rose-gold spikelets, trembling in the wind. Infallibly, the pennants would indicate the presence, just beneath, of some incipient truffle.
. . . . .
The flies, heavy with eggs, loathed being disturbed at this crucial period in their life cycle. Reluctantly, they sprang rather than flew from their perch; then, after several minutes, returned as if magnetized to those same fixated points. Cabassac, faithful to his superstitious habits, would wait for the fly to return three separate, totally distinct times before he dropped to his knees and began scooping up the earth immediately beneath. Sniffing the soil as he went, cupping it between the palms of his hands and inhaling deeply, he dug in the direction of that fungic ether: that volatile, saline, sulfurous perfume...he felt his whole body thrill to his fingertips' first encounter with one of those globular black fruit.
. . . . .
Once again, the dreams began in mid-November, Cabassac had managed to rout out a seventy-five-gram black truffle just a few days after the first ground frost had brought it to maturity. As always, he observed a three-day hiatus before dicing it into fat sections and consuming it with a runny omelette. He did so out of both tradition and superstition. It was a custom in Provence to let the truffle "embalm" the eggs for those three days, the truffle hermetically sealed in a glass jar along with the eggs themselves. In regard to superstition, Cabassac - a residual vestige, no doubt, of Christianity - held the trinity in unerring respect. He did everything in threes. He'd even fill his fountain pen three times; then, on a third fill, let three pendulous drops drip free of the gold nib. And so it was with the truffles. The trinity, at all costs, had to be respected.
The trinity - perhaps divine providence will bring me a third reading of The Fly-Truffler.