“The Telling Room” by Michael Paterniti, reviewed by John Freeman

This book could make you fat. It is a tale about cheese and will make you hungry for cheese. But, it is also about pleasure and the past. In the figure of Ambrosio Molinos de Las Heras, the wine-savoring master Castilian cheese maker at the heart of it, Michael Paterniti has found a man whose life story is a lesson in the dangers of combining these two things.
It all begins in Ann Arbor, Mich., in the early 1990s when Paterniti was a creative writing student at the university. Late in his studies it occurred to him he wasn’t learning very marketable skills. Weeks before graduation, he slings