"The Coffee Trader" by David Liss

The Coffee Trader, published 2003,
with coffee beans, which play a big role
in the novel, as they do in my daily life.

“It rippled thickly in the bowl, dark and hot and uninviting. Miguel Lienzo picked it up and pulled it so close he almost dipped his nose into the tarry liquid. Holding the vessel still for an instant, he breathed in, pulling the scent deep into his lungs. The sharp odor of earth and rank leaves surprised him; it was like something an apothecary might keep in a chipped porcelain jar. 

“‘What is this?’ Miguel asked.” 

So begins the novel The Coffee Trader by David Liss. In May, 1659, coffee was completely unknown in Amsterdam, where Miguel Lienzo was a speculator in commodities. His first smell and taste of a bowl of coffee was off-putting, but as the narrative proceeds he comes to love the beverage, which came by sea from far-off Asian plantations, and was served in a few taverns by Turkish immigrants. Moreover, Miguel decides to engage in a highly risky plot to manipulate the price of this new product in an effort to reverse recent setbacks in his business dealings and to make a fortune.

The Coffee Trader is a very entertaining historical novel, which I read some years ago, and which I just reread. I love learning about the Dutch Golden Age, with its remarkable painters, developing business climate, and its exceptional freedom for people of all faiths. I’ve been fascinated for a long time by the history of the Portuguese secret Jews who returned to Jewish practice in Amsterdam at that time. Miguel Lienzo and the people in his life belong to this very prosperous and closed-in community — his own father had been a victim of the Portuguese Inquisition, and Miguel and his brother had fled to Amsterdam. It’s a novel of intrigue and deception, and Miguel claims that having lived as a secret Jew made him outstanding in the practice of deception.

"In the Tavern" (1660) by Jan Steen could be an illustration for many of the chapters of The Coffee Trader.

Portrait of a young Jewish man, 1648,
Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669)

The novel's detail of the Dutch drawing rooms and kitchens, of the food and drink, of the taverns and low-life dives, and of the streets of Amsterdam is vivid. Descriptions of rich men, poor men, scoundrels, thieves, con men, good women, scheming women, dictatorial Jewish leaders, financial geniuses, and many other characters are wonderful. Author David Liss portrays much of the society of that era -- with occasional indirect references to a painter who works in the poorer Jewish neighborhood (you know who he was).

The individual speculators on the Amsterdam exchange depicted in the novel are fictitious, but the facts of the invention of market speculation and the popularization of coffee as a beverage and of "coffee taverns" that served it are real. The author, in fact, is a historian who was writing a dissertation on economic history of that era when he reapplied his learning to writing fiction about his subject matter. I'm glad he did it.

Also, I'm glad for coffee, though Miguel Lienzo at one point regrets his role in introducing it to his society. His thoughts:

"May the Holy One, blessed be He, forgive me for unleashing coffee upon mankind... . This drink will turn the world upside down." (p. 266)

Blog post © 2020 mae sander. Paintings from WikiArt. From Maefood.blogspot.com

David Liss (March 16, 1966)

I'm a big fan of the historical mystery novels -- mainly with Jewish characters of themes -- of David Liss. I've read all the ones depicted at right.

I was reading historic accounts of the Jewish communities of Amsterdam (in The Coffee Trader) and London (A Conspiracy of Paper) in the 17th and 18th century before he started to publish. I was delighted by his vivid characters, who considerably increased my ability to picture life in those times and places. His plots are good, and I especially appreciate his success at depicting the invention of stock markets and other economic innovations that were going on at the time, as well as of the conditions of life for Jews in those eras.

I'm a little less fond of The Whiskey Rebels, about the Whiskey Rebellion shortly after the American Revolution and the founding of the Federal Reserve system.

David Liss: "The Ethical Assassin"

The Ethical Assassin by David Liss is a suspense novel in which a naive character, 17-year-old Lemul Altick suddenly finds himself threatened by bizarre criminals and corrupt policemen in the heat and misery of 1980s Florida. Lem -- whose name is coincidentally the same as Swift's Lemuel Gulliver -- grows up and learns a great deal in his strange voyage of saving himself from a variety of dangers. He learns to deal with strange circumstances, with dishonest employers in his job selling encyclopedias door-to-door, with bullying from his age peers and others, and with ambiguity about which people he can believe or trust. It's not quite as excellent as some novels in this style (like by Graham Greene) but it's good.

The "ethical assassin" of the title is a stealthy, weird-looking, and mysterious character named Melford who offers long discourses on veganism and saving animals from human cruelty. Melford insists on the ethical imperative of his views; his persuasiveness pulls in Lem and at least one other character. Despite all the discussion of the wrongs of eating meat, food in the sense that I usually write about it hardly plays a role in this book.

Lem, attempting to skip meat thanks to Melford's discourses, dislikes the dairy-free bowl of oatmeal that's his only choice at an IHOP; he eats fruit when his hunger tempts him otherwise, and he also resists temptation from a girl who tries to lure him to eat a hamburger -- but this book is truly not about food in the style of many works of detective fiction. Melford's obsession with the ethics of eating meat plays a large role in the unfolding suspense -- making the discussions relevant without (in my opinion) turning this into a philosophic novel. It would in fact be perverse to read this as a tract about "meat is murder" though some of the amazon.com reviewers did read it this way. It's about a bizarre character whose quirk is animal rights.

Lem Altick, like the central characters in Liss's other novels, is a Jew. For Lem, being Jewish has no stated religious or ethical content, it's just one of many taunts from the bullies of his school days and his experiences in the narrative. The extent to which Jewishness has no meaning for Lem is a bit extreme. In Liss's other books, which are set in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the key Jewish characters (the ones who have to get themselves out of dangerous and strange situations) are not practicing their religion; they nevertheless are very conscious of its meaning and customs and how it affects the lives of their Jewish relatives. For Lem, it's nothing but another reason to pick on him, like being overweight (which he had been a few years before).

Since the publication of The Ethical Assassin, Liss has returned to publishing historical fiction, and also seems to be collaborating on some graphic novels. I've read the rest of his novels to date, and liked them. I would judge this the weakest though it's a good read. The historical content of the others gives them a greater depth than this one; the variety of really oddball characters in this one doesn't make up for this lack of depth. I'm looking forward to Liss's new historical novel, scheduled to appear in August.

I wrote this review for my food blog -- "The Ethical Assassin"