Book Review: *Benny & Shrimp* by Katarina Mazetti

• Benny & Shrimp by Katarina Mazetti
• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (July 28, 2009)
• ISBN-13: 978-0143115991

Back-of-the-book blurb: It starts in a cemetery, where they begrudgingly share a bench.  “Shrimp,” the childless young widow and librarian with a sharp intellect and a home so tidy that her jam jars are in alphabetical order, meets Benny, the gentle, overworked milk farmer who fears becoming the village’s Old Bachelor.  Both driven by an enormous longing and loudly ticking biological clocks, they can’t escape the powerful attraction between them.

But how will she learn to accept that he falls asleep at the opera and has a house full of his mother’s cross-stitch?  And how could he ever feel at home in her minimalist apartment, bare as a dentist’s waiting room?

She is Too Fond of Books’ review: Benny & Shrimp is a thoroughly enjoyable love story.  Mazetti reveals the courtship bit by bit, in short chapters, alternating first-person narration from both characters.  Sometimes they tell the same incident from different perspectives, but more often one picks up where the other left off.  It’s easy to get into the rhythm of the narration – Benny’s chapters start with a row of silhouetted farm animals, while Shrimp’s sections are set off with a geometric pattern (mirroring her love of clean lines and modern sensibilities) and a short poem that illustrates her mood, such as:

Parking meters
best-before dates
payment deadlines
metastases from the social body

When they first observe each other at the cemetery, they are caught up in grieving in their own ways (much as most facets of their lives reflect their divergent styles).  They’re filled with repulsion; Benny tends a gravestone with what Shrimp considers a lavish display – every possible curlicue, cherub and flourish are on his parents’ stone.  Shrimp sits on a bench across from her husband’s simple stone, plain and unassuming.

Benny finds Shrimp’s entire presence to be plain and unassuming … too plain (he will find out soon enough that she’s not unassuming!).  He says of her understated appearance:

Faded, like some old color photo that’s been on display for years.  Dried-out blond hair, a pale face, white eyebrows and lashes, wishy-washy pastel clothes, always something vaguely blue or beige.  A beige person.  The total insolence of her – it would only take a bit of makeup or bright jewelry to let the people around her know that here’s someone who at least cares what you see and what you think of me.  All her paleness says is:  I don’t give a damn what you think; I don’t so much as notice you.

Well, Shrimp does indeed notice Benny!  What follows is a whirlwind romance, complete with cute nicknames, shared anecdotes, and a passionate love:

Then we curled up on the sofa, wrapped fetuslike around each other, the champagne between us.  That night was glorious:  I felt like his Siamese twin.  I didn’t know you could get that close to somebody without actually sharing the same blood circulatory system.

But can it last?  Can a Benny, whose reading taste (on the rare occasion that he’d have a moment or two to read) runs to Farmer magazine and Phantom comics, mesh with Shrimp, whose tastes run to opera and Schopenhauer?  Can Shrimp, a vegetarian often subsisting on frozen food and restaurant meals, feel comfortable in Benny’s kitchen, with his assumption that she can make something of the odd lump of meat he finds in the freezer?  Can two people, whose pasts are as divergent as their futures look to be, find a mid-way point to meet?  In their mid-thirties, are they too set in their ways to adapt, for the sake of love?  Do they want to?

Benny & Shrimp is a quick read that shows what happens when love comes unexpectedly into our lives, then daily life itself gets in the way of love.  I recommend you sit down with it one weekend, and see how they resolved the integral conflict, and what they discovered about themselves in the process.

The Penguin paperback edition of Benny & Shrimp contains an insightful author interview, in which Katarina Mazetti reveals that wisps of inspiration for the novel came at a funeral; other personal experience, such as twenty years living on a dairy farm, also shaped the book.  The edition has a 9-question Reader’s Guide; this and an excerpt from Benny & Shrimp are on the Penguin website.