_sera Buena Persona El Cocinero - Javier Marias... Review

"He’s a cook, Jaime. He’s paid to follow recipes, not to radiate virtue," she said, her voice cutting through the heavy air of the restaurant.

I have often thought that the person who feeds us holds a power over our lives that is far more absolute, and perhaps more terrifying, than that of a doctor or a lover. The doctor intervenes when the damage is already done, and the lover’s betrayal is, at most, a matter of the spirit; but the cook—the man who stands behind the swinging doors of a kitchen, invisible and methodical—possesses the immediate capacity to alter our physical reality, to sustain it or to subtly undermine it, while we sit in the dining room discussing trivialities or the latest political disgrace. _Sera buena persona el cocinero - Javier Marias...

If he were a bad man, his excellence was a deception. We were consuming his discipline, his technique, his professional mask—but never his soul. And yet, if he were a truly good man, why did he hide in the steam and the heat, away from the eyes of those he nourished? "He’s a cook, Jaime

But I watched him through the service window. He was plating a sea bass with a delicacy that felt like a disguise. I wondered if he went home to a dark apartment and sat in the silence, regretting the things he hadn't said to a woman who left him twenty years ago, or if he was the type of man who felt nothing at all, which is perhaps the most dangerous form of "not being good." The doctor intervenes when the damage is already