The Hundred-Foot Journey by Richard C. Morais

Elizabeth Smirnova, 10th Grade

Richard C. Morais's The Hundred-Foot Journey made me so hungry I spent an hour making myself a cup of hot tea, two slices of toast, and a bowl of mango to eat while I read. This was largely due to Morais' beautiful descriptions of all things culinary (and only slightly due to my inability to focus on one task).

I've read a novel by Morais in the past, The Man with No Borders, and I enjoyed it fully - though the story was a little difficult to get through and confusing at times, the language was incredibly pleasing to read. I started The Hundred-Foot Journey with low expectations, as I wasn't sure if anything could live up to the experience I'd had reading The Man with No Borders. Needless to say, I was very wrong.

The book focuses on Hassan Haji, a boy growing up in Mumbai, India. His grandfather is a successful restaurant owner, so Hassan is constantly around local food markets and freshly made samosas. His grandparents "sold sweets made of nuts and honey, milky tea, but mostly they sold bhelpuri, a newspaper cone of puffed rice, chutney, potatoes, onions, tomatoes, mint, and coriander, all mixed together and slathered with spices." Doesn't that make you hungry? But due to his family's success, Hassan's life is chaotic in India. His family argues about the restaurant, and squabbles about recipes, costs, and business are frequent in the Haji household. He has five siblings and even more family nearby, and he lives in a loud and violent village. After tragedy strikes, his family moves to London, and then again to the small town of Lumière in France, where the Haji family again faces internal conflict but eventually finds peace.

Hassan Haji is an eccentric protagonist, to say the least. He often does things that are embarrassing at best, and incredibly inappropriate at worst. The first of these moments was when he gets a boner from sitting in a car with his cousin. Unfortunately, this is not the last such incident we see, as he also makes out with the same cousin in his backyard while his aunt yells at him from the other side of a door. He is young, grieving a great loss, and lonely, which explains why he pursues this girl to cure his heartache. He is at least self-aware of his actions, but so incredibly impulsive that he chooses to make bad decisions anyways, not thinking of the consequences his family will have to face. Fortunately, that incident is the last of this kind, as it acts as the catalyst for his family moving to France.

Hassan is a strange character, but he doesn't stand out among the others in the book. He acts more as a lens into the worlds we see, rather than a character who drives the plot in his own right. When he lands his first culinary apprenticeship with Madame Mallory, the owner of a successful French restaurant right across from the one his family owns, it is not even through his own initiative. But perhaps this is a more realistic aspect of Morais' storytelling-not everything in life is built from your own actions.

Hassan goes through many changes in the book, but his distinguishing optimism and hope stay with him throughout. He is also incredibly respectful to all the people he meets; he treats the apprentices in his grandfather's kitchen with the same respect as he does Madame Mallory, the owner of a Michelin-rated restaurant. Morais' use of the first person perspective highlights an intimacy between the reader and protagonist, and portrays Hassan with an endearing innocence instead of an infuriating naïvete.

Morais uses vivid details to introduce every character in the book and presents each character in such an intricate way that each one is likeable no matter their role. The lines between good and bad are blurred because all of the characters are presented as people, not just characters in Hassan's life. Even Madame Mallory, who is written to be despicable and aggravating, owns up to her mistakes and becomes a kinder person by the end of the novel.

Morais' prose was not just pleasant to read through, but funny as well: when describing Hassan's first taste of an egg-salad sandwich on the plane to London, Hassan says "and it was on these seats that I had my first taste of England...never before had I experienced anything so determinedly tasteless, wet, and white." Hassan also says: "The entire experience of leaving Bombay rather resembled a certain technique for catching octopus found in the Portuguese villages living off the rough waters of the Atlantic...the fisherman darts in, grasps the octopus's gill-like opening on the side of its head, and turns the entire head inside out so the internal organs of the octopus are exposed to the air." This was such an odd and obscure reference that I could not stop laughing for a while after I read it.

The ending of the book reveals a quieter moment; Hassan celebrates his success in life and commemorates his friends and family. He recognizes that he has found happiness because of the people around him, and carries on with his cooking, knowing that food has become his own expression of familial love and joy. The ending is not the same whirlwind of action that Hassan's earlier life provides--there is no violence, there is no death, and most importantly of all, there is no making out with cousins. His conclusion is still just as impactful as his beginnings; the joy in Morais' writing is that it illustrates the small triumphs in life with the same significance as the greater ones.