The Devil's Larder

By Jim Crace

One night when there are guests and all the wine has gone, they put the can into the candlelight amongst the debris of their meal and play the guessing game. An aphrodisiac. perhaps; “Let’s try . . .” ’ Bursting with delightfully subversive ingredients and mischievous behaviour, The Devil’s Larder is a sensuous portrait—in sixty-four parts—of a community in which meals cater not for taste buds but to satisfy the imagination This is a book about our loves. and hates, our appetites and desires, rendered with startling beauty and devilish invention.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Sep 6, 2013
• ISBN: 9780385666930

Jim Crace

Jim Crace is the prize-winning author of a dozen books, including Continent (winner of the 1986 Whitbread First Novel Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize), Quarantine (1998 Whitbread Novel of the Year and shortlisted for the Booker Prize), Being Dead (winner of the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award), Harvest (shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize and winner of the International Dublin Literary Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize) and The Melody. He lives in Worcestershire.

Reviews for The Devil's Larder

[pauntley · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Sixty four tales, vignettes, essays or squibs about eating, related throughout in prose of unvarying dry elegance. Very few of these meals are delightful. Some are sinister, others disgusting. Crace is anything but engaging in this collection.

[elliepotten · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Wow, this book was a disappointment. With the 'foodie vignette' premise, the striking lipsticked mouth on the front, and words like 'erotic', 'funny', 'delicious', 'tender', and 'profound' floating around in the reviewer quotes on the cover, I had high hopes. I was expecting a kind of fusion of Joanne Harris and Laura Esquivel, something sensual and rich, maybe with a hint of magic and darkness about it. Sounds good, right? Wrong. It was nothing like that. In fact, the food link in itself was rather tenuous at times. The book was just plain sick. Rather than touching tales, warmth and insight, these vignettes were bitter sour, riddled with food poisoning, sewers, various bodily functions, death and decay. A chef poisons his customers and enjoys thinking about how their bodies will violently reject his food later that day. A character watches a new set of neighbours unsuspectingly growing 'delicious' fruit and vegetables in the old owner's latrine disposal pit. A man watches through binoculars as schoolgirl shellfish-collectors and their teacher urinate on the beach. They're just a couple of the delights on offer. This just goes on and on - even when the story starts out nicely, it's like Crace can't resist throwing something disgusting in there to drag it back into the gutter. After the first few vignettes it really started to feel unnecessary and gratuitous, and once or twice I nearly gave up on the book, it was making me feel so ill. I carried on in the hope that there might just be a 'chapter' or two that would touch me, offer something profound, and thus make the rest worthwhile. I didn't find one. The whole thing just left me cold. I am very open-minded, not at all easily shocked, and I usually appreciate the subtleties behind a disturbing read, but - sorry Crace enthusiasts - this time I have no qualms about offering it a paltry half a star (just for the effort of writing) and saying that this was possibly the worst book I have ever read in my life.

[leaderelliott · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Sixty four tales, vignettes, essays or squibs about eating, related throughout in prose of unvarying dry elegance. Very few of these meals are delightful. Some are sinister, others disgusting. Crace is anything but engaging in this collection.

[zibilee_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is a book of 64 vignettes about food. But it's not simply about food, it's about the emotions that go along with the food and the complex issues surrounding the food. The style is lyrical and poetic, and subtle themes of all flavors are infused throughout it's pages. Jim Crace has done a fantastic job of making these short essays, more often then not, foreboding and dark. There are stories dealing with death and love, indifference and hate, and just about any human emotion that can be played out. There is more than one story about poisoning, accidental or otherwise. Some of the stories are only a few sentences long, but in those sentences he has packed an emotional range and vivacity that some authors can't seem to find even after hundreds of pages. Some of the stories are subtle and refined, others vulgar and coarse. The one thing that these stories all have in common is some relationship to food either direct or tangential.There are stories of a magic soup stone, it's granite flavoring hundreds of pots of stew and soup. Of cans missing labels that defy explanation of their contents. Tales of room service meals, and treachery played out in the form of sustenance. Stories of supernatural influences regarding food, and hungry nights out in the woods searching for anything that could be a meal. These stories have a rich feel, and many exotic ingredients pepper the pages: aubergines, morels and manac beans, razor clams, macaroons and a feast made of ingredients all of white. There are stories of fondue parties gone wrong, and stews made hearty with boiled leather. These stories are not for the touchy of stomach; they are a mash of devilish potency, spilling from the pages like verse.This is the perfect book to dip into and out of noncommittally. The stories are perfect for when you can only do a little reading at a time, or between chapters of another book. I read the book in its entirety, and it did not suffer for having not been digested in small bits. The book was enticing, while at the same time being slightly repulsing. There is so much inside this book alongside of food, mostly our complex relationships to the food and the feelings that food inspires in us.Though this was a strange book, and I have never read anything like it, it was pleasing and satisfying in it's own weird way. I had heard many things about it, and was eager to read it. Though it was short, it was unusually gratifying. I would recommend this book to those who are tired of the ordinary, and long for something that bites back.