Connection and Collection

Continuing with my focus on the significance of titles of books, I decided to take a closer look at the significance of collections in The Cookbook Collector. In a book about appetite and consumption, many characters have collections of one kind or another; the eponymous cookbook collector, George with his books and maps and old houses, Jess with her people, Emily with her mother’s letters. Even Rabbi Helfgott, a side character, had a collection of sorts of computer languages.

For these characters, the collections seem to be “proxies” for other desires that they see as impossible to reach [321]. George collects books to satisfy his “hunger for companionship,” reading them in a search for “the beautiful, and the authentic” [27]. Jess “tended to collect people,” picking up “little fascinations” in a facsimile of the love that she wants for herself, while Emily carefully collects her mother’s letters because she longs for a closer familial connection [6]. Rabbi Helfgott collected computer languages to compensate for his desire to have the “power to change the world” and “memory” [41]. All of these desires are interpersonal – a desire to have a certain kind of relationship in their lives. However, the collections are at a cross-purpose with the respective collector’s goals. To collect is to consume, a “selfish” goal [315]. They are trying to use objects to make up for what they lack in people, which will never work, so they keep collecting more and more of the same in the to fight the “longing” with “no end” (27).

The true solution is to go out and interact with people, to forge those bonds that they find themselves longing for. This can be demonstrated by Rabbi Helfgott, an older man who has already gone through his collector phase. He loved computers, but his superior sent him to Berkely instead. Although Rabbi Helfgott did not get to work with computers as much as he wanted, he did earn the influence over people he craved, which satisfied the underlying need of his collection of computer languages. Objects can never replace a desire for love, or family, or influence. During the novel, the character realize this. It leads to Jess and George falling in love, satisfying their mutual desire for such a relationship, and to Emily beginning her Geno.type project to connect families across the world.