The Telling Room: A Tale
of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World’s Greatest Piece of Cheese
By Michael Paterniti
368 pages, Random
House, 2013
An entire
book, and a rather longish one at that, revolving entirely around a single cheese?
How could I resist?
The Telling Room’s author, Michael Paterniti, may have started
off writing this book as an outside observer, but the resulting book is a
deeply personal one – and good thing, too, because I believe that is what ultimately
saves the book.
Paterniti first reads about Pàramo de Guzmàn, the fabled Spanish cheese
in the title, as a college student in the early nineties. Although he cannot
afford to taste this wonder himself at the time, he is struck by the
description of the cheese’s fabrication, a painstaking process filled with care
and patience, led by a single old-fashioned cheesemaker in a tiny village in
the Spanish region of Castile
