Book Review: Shakespeare's Kitchen by Lore Segal

I picked up this book at the library because it caught my eye. "Shakespeare's Kitchen". I thought, upon reading the title that it would be about Shakespeare. The cover flap disabused me of that notion. It is, in fact, a set of stories centered around a woman named Ilka whose life is, in turn, centered around a couple Leslie and Eliza Shakespeare and Concordance institute, an academic institution of unspecified focus. The reason I decided to check the book out is that I like short stories. I like short stories because they are usually a length that is digestible (for me) along with lunch, which is sadly one of the few times I get to sit down and read something that is not science. Anyway, this book turned out to be far better and more consistent than many short story collections I've read and to tell a story quite as coherently as many novels. I love the way Segal makes the format really work to tell the story, the way that the stories, which seem to be roughly (but maybe not strictly) chronological, have the quality of memory. I like the way things are left unsaid and often open to multiple interpretations (or misinterpretations). And finally, I like the way Segal uses language, how a word will appear in one place and then another linking seemingly unrelated ideas.

The first story in the collection is probably the weakest. Like the other stories, it centers around an incident but really it tells the story of Nat Cohn, a poet at Concordance institute. Nat is really not a particularly important figure in the rest of the collection and my mind did some back flips trying to fit the story in with the rest. In the end I decided (*spoiler alert*) that the story arc of this first story mirrors, quite nicely, the overall arc of the collection. In addition, being thrown into Nat's story before we meet the institute's characters is a lot like meeting a new group of people for the first time. They all know each other, they have their "in" jokes and they know each other's "stories". As an outside, you feel quite lost. By the end of the book, we are no longer lost, and so I had a much greater appreciation for Nat Cohn's story after reading the whole book than I did at the beginning.