The Debt to Pleasure - Softcover

John Lanchester

3.74

2,981 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0330344552 ISBN 13: 9780330344555

Publisher: McClelland & Stewart, 1997

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Draws the reader, through descriptions of food and cooking, into a world of murder and art. Narrated by Tarquin, an ironist, epicurean and a snob, this novel is constructed around a series of seasonal menus, which unfold his autobiography.

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Review:

A gorgeous, dark, and sensuous book that is part cookbook, part novel, part eccentric philosophical treatise, reminiscent of perhaps the greatest of all books on food, Jean-Anthelme Brillat Savarin's The Physiology of Taste. Join Tarquin Winot as he embarks on a journey of the senses, regaling us with his wickedly funny, poisonously opinionated meditations on everything from the erotics of dislike to the psychology of a menu, from the perverse history of the peach to the brutalization of the palate, from cheese as "the corpse of milk" to the binding action of blood.

From the Inside Flap:

This astonishing first novel is narrated by the impeccably correct Tarquin Winot, who relates the story of his life through the most basic and sublime of human passions: food. An Englishman of indeterminate age whose spiritual home has always been France, Tarquin embarks on a journey of the senses as he peels away the layers of his past. Wickedly funny and poisonously opinionated, he proves himself a master of sly wit and subversive ideas. Gradually the outlines of a distinctly quirky aesthetic and a highly eccentric moral universe emerge, and the truth becomes unavoidable. This is not the voluptuary?s memoir it purports to be, and Tarquin Winot is ultimately the master of something infinitely, quiveringly sinister.

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