Fannie flagg - fried green tomatoes at the stop-stop cafe. Grilled Green Tomatoes at the Flagg Stop Cafe Grilled Green Tomatoes at the Stop Stop Cafe

The book "Fried green tomatoes in the Polustanok Cafe” (1987) can be classified as a cult: i.e. there is a large category of people who like it. I do not dare to say whether these readers have anything in common.

I watched a movie based on this book on TV for quite some time (a 1991 movie), but since I see reviews of Fried Green Tomatoes from time to time, I finally decided to read the book.

The book didn't seem all that great to me, although it does have a certain charm. It describes the distant 30s-40s, when people were much poorer, but sincere and sincere.
I also like to read about the United States before 1945-1950, when they were still so sharply separated from us in terms of their level of well-being that they began to seem like aliens. Once upon a time, they too were starving and did not know what would happen to them tomorrow.
Again, the action takes place in the South, which we are so fond of " gone with the wind Faulkner and William Tennessee.

What is the problem? The fact that it was written in 1987, from the point of view of today's sugary American morality, and therefore seems artificial.

The novel has a rather chaotic composition. Most likely, the author did not expect such popularity and laid down several topics in the book, in the hope that some would shoot.

48-year-old housewife Evelyn Coach, visiting her unloved mother-in-law at the Pink Terrace nursing home, accidentally meets 86-year-old Ninny Threadgood there, who will change her whole life.
The old woman loves to chat, is distinguished by sociability and goodwill, and Evelyn shares her problems with her. Her problem is that she is not sure why she is depressed. Her children have grown up and left home, she has nothing to do, she has no spiritual contact with her husband. Basically, she's bored. She sees herself as a failure. Today, women work, build careers, change lovers, and she lived all her life with one man, rushing between the kitchen and the nursery. Where is her life now? Out of grief, Evelyn began to eat a lot and became very fat. This further aggravated her depression. She hates herself for excess weight, experiences suffering, and to drown them out, eats sweets. She is also very afraid of getting cancer, but she does not go to the doctors. Increasingly, she contemplates suicide.

But Ninny spreads her troubles with one left. Depression? This is a severe menopause: urgently see a doctor and take hormones. Fat? Just right. But great skin. You need to become a distributor in Mary Kay and earn a pink Mercedes there - an award for the best seller. How cool it is to ride in a pink Merc - the old woman herself would not refuse. But it's too late for her. Cancer is bullshit. What kind of cancer? Cancer patients do not have this complexion.

Evelyn began to always visit Ninny when she went to visit her mother-in-law with her husband. The husband insisted on visiting his mother once a week.

Influenced by conversations with Ninny, Coach spreads his wings. An additional psychotherapeutic effect is given by the old woman's stories of her youth when she lived in the tiny village of Half Station near Birmingham.
Ninny lost her parents early and ended up in the Threadgood family. They were extraordinary people: they themselves lived in poverty, but they accepted everyone, welcomed everyone, helped everyone.
As we can see from Ninni's last name, she became a full member of this family because she later married one of the Tregood brothers. True, she was in love with another brother, Buddy. Everyone was in love with him - he was so groovy, attractive, lively. But Buddy tragically died in his youth when he was hit by a train. For some reason, at Polustanka, people constantly became victims of trains, although families of railway workers lived in it.

But main character book is not Ninnie - she is only a storyteller, and not a depressed housewife, but Idgie Tregood. She is 7 years younger than Ninny and 8 years younger than Buddy.
As Ninny says, in large families everyone has their favorites: Buddy chose Idgie and dragged her everywhere with him, including to the house of prostitute Eva Bates.

Idgie was weird. She did not want to play with dolls and dress up, she loved to climb trees, was friends with boys, and at the age of 10 she announced that she would no longer wear a dress and, indeed, never parted with menswear.

Buddy's death was a tragedy for Idgie. She did not talk to anyone for a year, until she came to the village to visit the priest's family. beautiful girl Ruth. Iji fell in love with her at first sight. Everyone noticed this, but did not find anything wrong with it.

Irji took care of Ruth in a peculiar way. Once she took her with her into the forest and showed that she knew how to conjure bees - she collected a jug of honey from a hollow for Ruth, but the bees did not sting her. At that moment, Ruth's heart also trembled. But she knew it was wrong. Ruth left and married Frank Bennett. He turned out to be a scoundrel: he cheated on his wife, beat her.
Idgie found out about it. She, firstly, threatened Frank that she would kill him, and secondly, she took Ruth to the Stop Station. In this she was helped by the Negro Big George living with his family.

No one knew then that Ruth was pregnant.

Ruth and Idgie began to live together. The born child became, as it were, their common son. They named him Buddy. Idgie's parents gave her money, with which she opened a roadside cafe. Big George cooked in the cafe - he did the best barbecue in the world - and his foster mother Sipsy.
Sipsy had no children of her own, but she nursed all the Tregood children. One day, a passenger gave her her baby, which she had grown up in the city, to her - so Sipsy had her own baby. Sipsy was crazy about children, and she was also a great cook. She was especially fond of fried green tomatoes. She cut them up, rolled them in flour and fried them in fat rendered from bacon (on bacon, or what?).

The abandoned husband did not reconcile himself to the loss of Ruth and the child, and one fine day showed up at the Polustanok. But then he disappeared. Nobody else saw him. A murder case was opened, although the body was never found. The whole novel continues this intrigue.

Another intrigue is who was the well-wisher who, during the Great Depression, robbed trains with food and scattered it next to the road. They called him "Railroad Bill" and they thought he was a Negro. But no one saw his face. Thanks to the Railroad Bill, many poor people, mostly Negroes, survived.

The younger Buddy also got hit by a train, but survived. He just had his arm amputated. Idgie began to call him "Stump". The name stuck. Despite the injury, Buddy grew up as a normal guy, graduated from something there, started his own family.

Ruth's life with Idgie wasn't all that smooth. Sometimes Idgie got drunk, and left the house, and talked with the prostitute Eva Bates, whom she called her friend.

Idgie was also an excellent poker player, and she had a poker club. From the members of this club, another club was formed - "Pickled Cucumber". Members of this club at meetings competed in who would lie better. Iji was a champion in this too. For example, she said that she caught such big fish that only her photograph weighs 50 kg.

Iji was the friend of the most different people. Among them were numerous vagrants, blacks, as well as the local sheriff, who simultaneously acted as head of the Ku Klux Klan.

In addition to Ruth, Idgie also loved Buddy Jr. She helped him survive two crises: at the age of 7 he realized that he was not like other children because of his injury (he could not participate in the shooting game), and at 17 he was very afraid of girls. His aunt (as he called her) took him to people who had a three-legged dog that could stand on its front legs, and then she taught him to shoot accurately, and he became the best shooter in the area. He was saved from another problem by his aunt's friend, Eva.

In Polustanka there were fairy tales. For example, Big George's daughter got sick. She didn't want to eat anything until she saw the elephant from the circus. The circus was in the nearest big city - Birmingham, but Big George and his girl could not go to the circus, because they were blacks. Then Iji herself went to the owner of the circus, beat him in poker for a bet, and he brought the elephant to the Half Station.

In general, both the theme of racial segregation and the theme of social inequality are raised in passing in the novel. This is how a day in the life of one of the episodic heroes is described - a tramp who was secretly in love with Ruth. He, along with the boy who had become attached to him along the way, spent the night in the park big city, which many homeless people chose as a place to sleep, and the police raided the square and killed the boy. The tramps later buried him, but since they did not know his name, they simply wrote “Boy” on the tablet.
This vagabond was a vagabond by conviction. He said that you only need to piss from the freight train once, and that's it - you're gone. He loved the free life, but many times he returned to the Stop Station to see Ruth.

Much is said about the life of the descendants of Big George. He married a very fair mulatto woman, and his children were both completely black and almost white. The bright son became a guide and even taught something like our title "Best in Profession". He was able to educate his children. And the black son grew up to be a bum. Hated whites, lived in a Negro ghetto in Birmingham. He really liked that everyone was there. He did not work, but lived on the money of his wife, who was a servant in a rich house. He wore a suit of red sharkskin and patent leather shoes. Once he saw his very fair niece in the store. He approached her, but she did not recognize him. The salesmen called the police for molesting a white woman.
He was in prison for resisting the police - he saved a friend's dog from transportation, but quarreled with the police. In general, there are many such stories.

When Ruth was 40 years old, she learned that she had cancer. She died soon after. The cafe was closed, and the village of Polustanok ceased to exist.

True, there was another big episode after the death of Ruth. The police for some reason reopened the case of the death of her husband Frank, which occurred 20 years ago. Idgie and Big George were accused. Their affairs were very bad, but a priest unexpectedly came to the rescue, over whom Iji and her friends mocked all their lives: they sent everyone who wanted to buy booze, condoms, etc. to him. But Idgie once helped his son, when he got into the police on a drunkenness - she ransomed him, agreed that the protocol should be destroyed. The young man called her, not his father, because he was afraid that his father would judge him. Idgie kept this story a secret, but the son himself told his father about it, and he considered it necessary to repay the debt.
And the priest lied under oath that Idgie and Big George are excellent parishioners, and in those days when the deceased disappeared, they were at a service that lasted as many as 3 days, and he had it all written down in the Bible. He also brought witnesses - all the vagrants that Idgie fed and her prostitute friend. On the occasion of the trial, they were dressed up in rented costumes. The judge knew that the priest was lying, but he did not care, because he did not love the deceased - he once knocked up his daughter and left him. Ruth's late husband misbehaved with many women.

ABOUT later life Iji Ninni does not report.
She told about herself that she gave birth to a mentally retarded boy, who is about 40 years old. But she believed that she was very lucky, because the doctors said that she would not have children at all due to a very narrow pelvis. And she had a 40-year-old baby, whom she wiped her ass and fed with porridge. According to Ninni, it was a great happiness.

This optimistic approach to life shocked Evelyn, and she began to lose weight and sell Mary Kay cosmetics, and also went to the doctor and calmed down about her health. But first she went through a series of spiritual crises. So she was tormented by anger at men, she came to the conclusion that the most important thing in life is to have eggs and almost seriously thought about whether to sew a couple for herself.

So who killed Ruth's husband? Oddly enough, the old black Sipsy. He came when no one else was at home, and wanted to take his son away, and Sipsy hit him with a heavy frying pan and accidentally killed him. Big George cut up the body and had a barbecue. The visitors ate everything. Including treated and detectives who were looking for a missing man on fresh tracks.

And Railroad Bill was, of course, Idgie. She put on a mask and entered the trains that stopped at the Half Station at night. There was no way they could catch her, because her friend, the sheriff, was looking for her.
The text from the author tells about it.

There are also humorous notes in the book from the local newspaper "Post Station Bulletin", which was made by a certain Mrs. Weems. For the most part, she wrote about her husband: “My better half did a terrible stupid thing on Saturday. He took it and scared the life of his poor wife with a heart attack. The doctor says it’s nothing serious, but he still has to quit smoking. big grumpy bear, but I cherish it and cherish it, so all last week Mr Wilbur Weems gets breakfast in bed. If any of our brave men have a desire to cheer up my old man, you are welcome to run. Just do not try to take cigarettes with you - they will immediately take them away. He already pulled a pack from me. Apparently, I'll have to give up on this myself. When it settles down, I'll take it with me on vacation."

At the end of the novel, the built-up housewife came to visit old Ninni, and she died. Then she went to the Polustanka cemetery to her grave. She put flowers, talked about her successes: she still got a pink Mercedes, and she also now leads a group for women who are having a hard time with menopause and shares her success story. At the same time, I discovered Ruth's grave, on which lay fresh flowers with a note that said: "From the Bee Charmer."

So, is Idgie still alive? Yes, in 1988, she still ran a cafe on the side of Highway 90 with one of Big George's sons (who worked as a conductor). They served wild honey and told a story about a fish whose photograph weighed 50 kg.

What is good about this novel? The author managed to create a certain atmosphere. You seem to see all these people in a haze, hear their voices. Events overlap one another, and small ones next to large ones, tragedies next to funny episodes.
What is wrong? Some of the threads are broken. Many stories are old, bearded jokes.
Why so many stories about Negroes and so few about the Idgie brothers and sisters? We were told that the Tregoods had big family- and then what? Where have the last 40 years of Idgie's life gone?

In some ways, this novel seems fake to me. Ah, the good old South! Yes, we had the Ku Klux Klan, but so sweet, homely. We loved our blacks. Previously, blacks were offended, but now all this is in the past. But it was in Birmingham that the Lately racial unrest.

I think that if it were not for the piquancy, which consists in family life two women, the romance would not have become so popular.

I liked the movie better. There are no side lines, and most importantly, Buddy tells little Idgie, who is worried that she is not like all the girls, that there are many identical shells in the sea, but one of them is special because it contains a pearl. That's how Iji is special. It turns out that these words were invented by the screenwriter.

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Thematic table of contents (Reviews and criticism: literature)

“My flesh lives in the Pink Terrace Nursing Home, but my heart and thoughts have never left the Way Stop Cafe, where fried green tomatoes are served for lunch…”

Fannie Flagg Fried Green Tomatoes
in the cafe "Polustanok"

Cooking and eating green, not yet ripe tomatoes? Come on? Do people really do that? Are you kidding me?

Ever since I came across the title of Fanny Flagg's novel, I've been asking myself these questions from time to time. Like many, it seemed to me that tomatoes should be red and fresh, not green and fried. But it turned out that with the right approach, they can show themselves perfectly even in an unripe form. In Russia, they are most often made into something like salads and rolled into jars. Or pickled, which is also an option.

In the American South, green tomatoes are treated differently. There they are fried and served immediately, still hot. Residents of the southern states value unripe vegetables for their characteristic sour taste. To soften and shape it, the tomatoes are fried in breadcrumbs - it turns out a crispy outside and juicy inside dish. Either a side dish or an appetizer.

There is another institution where you should go based on the film - in the city of Juliet, Georgia, where the filming of the tape took place.

From an abandoned building that used to be a store, director Jon Avnet turned the cafe Idzhi and Ruth. Once the film became popular, the property owner turned the set into a restaurant that still answers tourists' questions about the filming and serves green tomatoes.

How to cook the main course of the novel, Fannie Flagg herself told - on the last pages of the book she shares recipes for what was served at the Whistle Stop: buttermilk cookies, nut pie, southern chicken. And two options at once, how to fry green tomatoes. She ended the second recipe with the words “This is the most tasty dish in the world!". Okay, so be it.

Salt pepper
Vegetable oil

Cooking:

1. Cut the tomatoes into slices 5-7 mm thick. Salt and pepper on both sides.

2. In one bowl, lightly beat the egg, mixing the yolk and protein. In another - pour breadcrumbs, add a little salt and pepper.

You can also add dried garlic and dried herbs to the crackers.

3. Pour vegetable oil into the pan - it should cover the entire surface with a thin layer. Warm up well. Dip each slice of tomato on both sides first in the egg, then roll in breadcrumbs, trying to make the breading lie as evenly as possible.

4. Put the tomato slices in a pan and fry over medium-high heat for a couple of minutes until dark golden brown. Carefully flip the slices over and fry on the other side.

5. Take out the finished fried tomatoes, put them on paper towels for a few minutes to remove excess fat and serve immediately, still hot.

Flagg Fanny

Fried green tomatoes at Polustanok Cafe

Translation from English by Dina Krupskaya

GRATITUDE

I would like to express my gratitude to those people who provided me with invaluable help and support when I wrote this book. First of all, this refers to my literary agent Wendy Weil, who never lost faith in me, editor Sam Vaughan for his care and attention and for the minutes of laughter in the process of writing the text, and Martha Levine from Random House, who became my closest friend. I also thank Gloria Seifer, Liz Knock, Margaret Cafarelli, Anna Bailey, Julia Florence, James Hatcher, Dr. John Nixon, Jerry Hann, Jay Sawyer, and Frank Self. De Thomas, Bobo & Associates helped me through a difficult time of need. I am grateful to Barnaby and Mary Conrad of the Santa Barbara Writers Association, Joe Roy of the Birmingham public library. Jeff Norell of Birmingham Southern College, Ann Harvey and John Locke of Oxmoor House Publishing. Huge thanks to my assistant and typist Lisa McDonald and her daughter Jessie, who sat quietly watching Sesame Street while her mom and I worked. And I send special gratitude to all the inhabitants of Alabama dear to my soul - my heart, my home.

Tommy Thompson

"My flesh lives in the Pink Terrace Nursing Home, but my heart and thoughts have never left the Way Stop Cafe, where fried green tomatoes are served for lunch..."

Reflections from Mrs. Virginia Threadgood at Rose Terrace, June 1986

WEEKLY MRS WIMES

"Post Station Bulletin"

NEW CAFE

Last week, in my neighborhood, next to the post office, the Polustanok cafe opened. His mistresses - Idgie Threadgood and Ruth Jemison - seem to be pleased: things are slowly getting better. Idgie asks her friends not to worry that they will be poisoned here: she does not cook herself, two black women, Sipsy and Onzella, run the kitchen, and Onzella's husband, Big George, is personally responsible for the barbecue.

For those who have not yet had time to look into the cafe, Iji informs: breakfast is served here from 5.30 to 7.30. You can order eggs, oatmeal, crackers, bacon, sausage, ham with spicy tomato sauce and coffee - all this will cost you 25 cents.

For lunch and dinner, you can enjoy pork chop with gravy, fried chicken, catfish, chicken dumplings or barbecue. In addition, you can take vegetables, crackers or cornbread, plus dessert and coffee - for everything about everything 35 cents.

Idgie says veg options include corn in white sauce, fried green tomatoes, fried okra, cabbage or turnips, cowpeas, sweet yam, Carolina beans, or lima beans. And for a sweet pie.

My better half, Wilbur, and I dined there yesterday, and it was so delicious that he said, "That's it, I don't eat at home anymore." Haha! Well, if so. And then I do not get out of the kitchen, cooking for this swallow, and still I can not feed him his fill.

By the way, Idgie claims that one of her hens laid an egg with a ten dollar bill inside.

SHELTER FOR THE ELDERLY "ROSE TERRACE"

Old Montgomery Highway, Birmingham, Alabama

Today, Evelyn Coach dragged her husband back to the Rose Terrace to visit Big Mama - his mother. Her mother-in-law could not stand her, and Evelyn quickly ran away from them into the hall for visitors, in order to enjoy the sweets she had stored in peace and quiet. But as soon as she settled herself comfortably, the old woman in the next chair suddenly spoke:

If you ask me in what year so-and-so got married, whom did he marry and what was the mother of the bride wearing, in nine cases out of ten I will answer correctly. But for the life of me, I can’t remember when I got so old. Somehow, unexpectedly, everything turned out: once - and already an old woman.

You know, the first time I discovered this was in June when I was admitted to the hospital with a gallbladder. They probably still keep it, or maybe they threw it out already, who knows. The nurse - such a fat woman, it's scary - was just about to give me a second enema, they just love doing enemas there. And then I look, on my hand I have a piece of paper like a tag. I looked closely, and it says: "Mrs. Virginia Threadgood, 86 years old." Imagine!

I returned home and said to Mrs. Otis, my friend: they say, all that remains for us now is to sit back and wait until you die. And she: “I prefer the expression “depart to another world.” Poor thing! I somehow didn’t turn my tongue to tell her that there really was no difference: whatever you call it, we’ll all die the same.

But it’s still funny: while you’re little, time is marking time in one place, and when it hits twenty, it raced like an ambulance to Memphis. Sometimes it seems to me that life somehow slips past us, you don’t even feel it. Of course, I'm judging by myself, I don't know how it happens to others. It seems like yesterday it was still a little girl, and now it's a hop, and an adult woman, with breasts and hair in secluded places. And how I managed to miss all this, I have no idea. However, I never had a special mind, neither at school, nor later ...

Me and Mrs. Otis from a small town, it's called the Way Station. It's ten miles from Rose Terrace, where the railroad yard is, you heard it? Hence the name Polustanovok. She and I have lived on the same street for the last thirty years. When Mrs. Otis' husband died, her son and daughter-in-law persuaded her to move here to the orphanage. And they asked me to live with her at least for the first time, until she gets used to it here. Then I will return home, only this is a secret, you understand?

And it's not so bad here. At Christmas, we all wore party hats. Mine was embroidered with glittering Christmas balls, and Mrs. Otis had a Santa Claus face. But the cat had to be left at home. It's terrible! I miss her very much. I've kept a cat all my life, or even two. I had to give it to the neighbor girl who waters my geraniums. I have, you know, four tubs of geraniums in front of the house, and the geranium is so wonderful, you just can't take your eyes off it.

My Mrs. Otis is only seventy-eight. She is a nice woman, really nice, just a little nervous. I kept my gallbladder stones in a jar under my bed, so she made me put them away. She said that the look of them made her depressed. How small. However, after all, she is a small stature, and I, as you can see, a large lady. I have a wide bone, and everything else.

“Fried Green Tomatoes” by Fannie Flagg became a cult book in Russia practically after the first edition in Russian. For two decades, the novel was reprinted many, many times, but even today its popularity is extremely high. "Fried Green Tomatoes" is already being read by probably the third generation of the reading public. The novel is placed on a par with the great American books - To Kill a Mockingbird and Huckleberry Finn - and the mere mention of Flagg's book in such a row testifies to its strength. And for sure: Fried Green Tomatoes is a classic of American and world literature.

If you bring this volume close to your ear, then you can surely hear someone laughing, crying, talking, the noise of a train, the rustle of leaves, the clinking of forks and spoons. Listen to the sounds that make their way through the cover, and you will recognize the story of one small American town, in which, like everywhere else in the world, love and pain, fears and hopes, friendship and hatred intertwined. This story will be told with such sincerity that it will be remembered for long years, and Fannie Flagg's novel will become one of the most beloved books - as it has become for so many around the world.

Idgie has always been a tomboy with a heightened sense of justice. She remained so when she grew up and, together with her beloved friend, opened the Polustanok cafe, in which she welcomes everyone, poor and wealthy, black and white, cheerful and sad. The stories that happen to Iji and her loved ones are sometimes painfully realistic, and sometimes they are completely unbelievable, but they are always addictive, making you feel like it all happens in real life. For great romance Fannie Flagg is life itself.

From press releases:

Fried Green Tomatoes is a true classic, one of the best American novels of the 20th century. An exceptionally kind, subtle book, saturated with love for people, humor and slight sadness. An undeniable masterpiece.

Fannie Flagg is one of those few writers whose wise and poetic books leave a long and wonderfully pleasant aftertaste. Charming, funny and poignant prose by Fanny Flagg - universal remedy from blues. With pleasure getting used to the cozy world of her novels, making a short acquaintance with living and recognizable characters, we get a great chance to temporarily forget about the anxieties and difficulties that surround us in real life.

"Fried Green Tomatoes" deservedly entered the list of the main women's books XX century.

About authors

Fanny Flagg (Fannie Flagg, born in 1944) - American writer. The first novel, Daisy Faye and the Miracles (1981), was at the top of the New York Times bestseller list for 10 weeks, which is incredible for a debut. The second novel, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Stop Stop Cafe, which was praised by Harper Lee and other masters of literature, stayed on this list for 36 weeks, becoming an international bestseller. The book was turned into an unforgettable movie hit, a classic of American cinema. The screenplay, written by Fannie Flagg herself, won a Screenwriters Guild Award and was nominated for an Oscar. But this book was also inferior in success to the novel "Welcome to the world, baby!" (1999), much more widely acclaimed and chosen as Outstanding Book of the Year by the New York Times, and called by the daily Christian Science Monitor "a captivating ... humorous novel welcomed with open arms." The only thing more enjoyable than reading Fannie Flagg's books is listening to herself read them. A natural storyteller, she has a warm, welcoming voice with a soft Alabama accent. For reading audiobooks, Flagg received Grammy Award. In 2016, she wrote the book “What the whole city is talking about”, which, according to, will be the last big novel in her work. Fannie Flagg currently lives in California and Alabama.

Fannie Flagg's Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe took me a while to read. At first I left reading due to the fact that it seemed boring to me and reminded me of ““. But then I came back and got carried away so much that I read it to the end. For the lazy, my video review of the book:

The book as a whole is well worth it. I recommend! I read it in in electronic format. I think that you can easily download Flagg in any format. If you can't find it, here's a link from Litres:

Summary of Fried Green Tomatoes

In 1985 in Birmingham, Alabama, housewife Evelyn Couch is forced to visit her mother-in-law in a nursing home. They have a tense relationship, and Evelyn, trying to avoid her, meets with another nursing home resident, whose name is Ninny Threadgoode (Eng. Ninny Threadgoode). She begins to tell Evelyn stories from her life in the town of Whistle Stop in the outback of Alabama, starting in the 1920s.

Evelyn is having a hard time with a midlife crisis, her children have grown up and started their own families, her relationship with her husband is not the best, she is tormented by thoughts of loneliness and death. Her life, once smooth and flawless, has lost all meaning, Evelyn Coach, at the age of 48, has ceased to take care of herself, eating chocolate bars has become the only cure for depression. Ninni lived a difficult life, she lost her parents early, was widowed early, her only son was born handicapped and also did not live to old age. Despite this, at the age of 86, Ninny has not lost her love for life, she is so full of it that Evelyn, who visits her, begins to see her sorrows and sorrows in a different light. Gradually, the goal of visits to the nursing home is not the mother-in-law, but the stories of Ninni and her society. Women, without noticing it, become friends. The people that Ninny talks about start to mean a lot to Evelyn, she often thinks about them, they fill the void in her life. Evelyn Coach is changing her mind about the future as her older friend reminded her that she still has half her life ahead of her.

The book is written in a very peculiar way, the reader is invited to observe the events from different angles. The author does not adhere to the chronological sequence; he narrates the events in the way that usually happens in a conversation when they state the episode that was remembered in this moment. Some documentary in the description of the life of Polustanok is given by excerpts from the Bulletin of Polustanok. At the end of the book, the reader is offered several recipes for dishes that were served at the Polustanok cafe a long time ago, including two recipes for cooking fried green tomatoes.

Reviews of the novel Flagg:

If you bring this volume close to your ear, then you can surely hear someone laughing, crying, talking, the noise of a train, the rustle of leaves, the clinking of forks and spoons. Listen to the sounds that make their way through the cover, and you will recognize the story of one small American town, in which, like everywhere else in the world, love and pain, fears and hopes, friendship and hatred intertwined. This story will be told with such sincerity that it will be remembered for many years, and Fannie Flagg's novel will become one of the most beloved books - as it has become for so many around the world.

Idgie has always been a tomboy with a heightened sense of justice. She remained so when she grew up and, together with her beloved friend, opened the Polustanok cafe, in which she welcomes everyone, poor and wealthy, black and white, cheerful and sad. The stories that happen to Iji and her loved ones are sometimes painfully realistic, and sometimes they are completely unbelievable, but they are always addictive, making you feel like it all happens in real life. For Fannie Flagg's great novel is life itself.

Fried Green Tomatoes is a true classic, one of the best American novels of the 20th century. An exceptionally kind, subtle book, saturated with love for people, humor and slight sadness. An undeniable masterpiece.

Good book, I agree 🙂

I got acquainted with the book a long time ago, its title attracted me, and several friends strongly recommended it for reading, as a result, I have already re-read it 3 times and will read it again in a couple of years).

The plot can't be described in a few words, but still. A small town near Birmingham, living mainly on railway, the action takes place over several decades, starting from the 20s of the last century. The main events are connected with two friends, Idzhi and Ruth, who own the Polustanok cafe. In general, there are a lot of heroes in the book - almost the whole town. For the most part, the story is told from the perspective of Ninny Threadgood, who, while already in a nursing home in 1985, tells amazing stories from Half Station's life to visiting middle-aged woman Evelyn Coach. In addition to Ninny Threadgut, the narrators are other residents of the Stop Station, Evelyn Coach (whose life was radically changed by the Stop Stop, although she had never heard of him before) and the author of the work itself.

Life in the Polustanka is measured, but at the same time something is constantly happening. Given the time period and the fact that the setting is the south of the United States, there is the Ku Klux Klan, and the Depression, and the war. But everything revolves around residents who are always ready to support each other, and for a long time no one thought to lock the doors in the town, although the times were different. There are a lot of events - both sad and funny, but Fanny Flagg puts kindness and humanity at the head of everything, which makes the book even more pleasant to read, it is so positive and life-affirming.

I will not pour water too much, I will only say that the book is worth reading when you want something kind, funny, a little sad, but at the same time setting you on a positive wave. As is the case with other books by Fanny Flagg (for example, “Standing Under the Rainbow”), it’s even sad to leave the main characters, perhaps that’s why I re-read the book from time to time).