“You are not more likely to find a more charming novel than Tartufo, Kira Jane Buxton’s story about “trufflemania” that whisks us away to Italy and serves up one buttery page of comedy after another.” —Washington Post literary critic Ron Charles
When comics pay the highest compliment, they say you’re funny as fuck. I know, such language, it’s terrible. But as a comic who’s just read Kira Jane Buxton’s new book, Tartufo, I have to say the woman is funny as fuck.
Tartufo is enchanting, raucous, packed with hilarious, rebellious characters, both animal and human, and it tells the tale of the dying Tuscan town of Lazzarini Boscarino being given hope of resurrection by a giant, six-pound truffle, presented as a god.
And what does the god-like truffle smell like to Buxton? “It smells like sex in a very small room.”
The animals of the woods, the deer and wild boar are the first to smell it, then animals in town. A dog understands that she will soon follow her nose to show her master what is out there. “The cipher that is summoning her. Calling for her in chemicals. A tease. A treasure. A story sent to her on the wings of the wind…and it will change everything.”
Buxton’s comedy is as deftly crafted as standup; the punch words of the jokes are at the end of the sentence. She pares the jokes down to the fewest syllables possible, and the comedic rhythm sweeps us along with perfect timing. I ask her if she ever tried performing standup live.
“I’ve never tried standup. I think that’s one of the art forms I revere the most. I’ve fantasized about trying, but I’m an introvert in an extrovert drag. I love listening to it, and maybe by osmosis I picked up some of the cadence.”
Cadence indeed. Humor dances across every page with infectious rhythm.
Here, Buxton introduces a cat named Al Pacino: “On this autumn morning, the piazza is empty but for one being. A cat—best described as a cross between a crumpled tuxedo and a well-used toilet wand—sits vigilant. Seven unplanned litters of kittens have tested her patience and her personality, so that she has matured into the kind of cat that will take a crap on the carpet before she takes crap from anyone else. … Ready to unleash hell upon any tourist who dares to smuggle an exposed ankle in through its door. For what is a tourist, truly, but an invader with blinding white crew socks and a selfie stick?”
Her blockbuster debut novel, Hollow Kingdom, was a finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor, the Audie Awards and the Washington State Book Awards, and was named a best book of 2019 by NPR and Good Housekeeping. The protagonist is a crow named Shit Turd who navigates a post-apocalyptic world of humans and zombies.
“Hollow Kingdom was the book I really didn’t believe anybody would touch. I wrote it for pleasure. I wrote it because I wanted to write about crows. I’m so passionate about them,” Buxton says.
“I wanted to write about the environment. You know, I wanted to write about tech addiction, and I wanted to have fun. And I finally stopped chasing so hard for all the trappings of publishing. I mean, to come up with a protagonist named Shit Turd…if I had been striving for landing a huge deal with a publisher, I would maybe have rethought it and the crow would have been, like, Bob,” she says.
Quite a different tale, Tartufo (Italian for truffle) has the same delightful lyrical rhythm and is packed with eccentric human characters and even more aberrant animal characters. Buxton has an uncanny ability to become the animal, and for a hilarious paragraph or two we get to travel as an ant, a cat, or a donkey who is so congenial he was nearly elected mayor of the town.
Tartufo is hilarious (every page), a delicious romp (Italian food throughout) that celebrates the connectedness of it all. Buxton says, “We’ve forgotten that it’s not us against the natural world; it’s not us and the natural world. It’s us. All of us, it’s all connected.”
What moved me most, when I wasn’t laughing, was letting the story and the writing sweep me along to experience that feeling that everything really is connected.
Buxton’s first line of text sees the wind as a spirit that affects all the book’s creatures: “The wisest souls say that pure mountain air makes us all go a little mad.” And the author lets the air of the Apuan Alps blow through every character in the story, and all do go a little mad.
Her descriptions of the natural world are so passionate that she will abandon verbs. “A fierce living perfume of the largest truffle he has ever seen envelopes him. An earthy aphrodisiac. Fermented sweat seeped from an earthen grave. The breath of a Gigantic god.”
Nature imbues the human throughout the book. Giuseppina, the manager of Bar Celebrita—the last bar of the village—“turns to the mirror, jostling the warring jellyfish in her beige bra.” The flow of time is natural: “Time trickles slowly in Tuscan towns, like a golden sap.” Even medicine has an animal component; when Delizia unwittingly becomes the new mayor, “she had considered helping herself to a little horse tranquilizer, but decided she couldn’t live with the additional guilt of depriving an enfeebled horse.” It is all relatable to us.
The auctioning of the giant truffle (six pounds) turns into a huge media event that overwhelms the citizenry. “Delizia is faced with the dilemma of her town not being ridiculed on the world stage.” The crisis deepens as the important town documents get shredded by mice. Madness and mayhem build; there is even a car chase of sorts. The approaching auction of the godlike truffle brings greed, attacks by a disgraced mailman, a psychic named Mamma Fortuna who must cover her crystal ball to prevent it from setting fire to the curtains, and an apparent battle with a ghost for the truffle.
Buxton was concerned about putting out this raucous, rollicking, funny ride of a novel in a time like this, that is so hard for so many. “At first, I was very nervous about releasing and promoting a book at this time, but the more I think about it, the more I think stories matter so much, they enable us to connect on a deeper level with others. They foster empathy. My hope for the evening is we all get together, have a chat and a laugh. Just have a laugh.”
In Tartufo, when the 86-year-old Nonna, “the soul and sunshine of the village,” is being chastised for being too silly about the recipe ingredients for roasted beans, her reply comes from Buxton’s soul: “Sometimes silly is the very ingredient we need.”
For her reading next Thursday at Bookshop Santa Cruz, Buxton will be joined in conversation by best-selling author and Santa Cruz literary light Elizabeth McKensie. Both women are funny—so if you like animals, Italian food and laughter, reserve a space.
Kira Jane Buxton reads at 7pm on Feb. 13 at Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Ave. Free; RSVP at bookshopsantacruz.com.
