The Devil's Larder: A Feast
By Jim Crace
3.5/5
()
About this ebook
A sumptuous, scintillating stew of sixty four short fictions about appetite, food, and the objects of our desire
All great meals, it has been said, lead to discussions of either sex or death, and The Devil's Larder, in typical Cracean fashion, leads to both. Here are sixty four short fictions of at times Joycean beauty--about schoolgirls hunting for razor clams in the strand; or searching for soup-stones to take out the fishiness of fish but to preserve the flavor of the sea; or about a mother and daughter tasting food in one another's mouth to see if people really do taste things differently--and at other times, of Mephistophelean mischief: about the woman who seasoned her food with the remains of her cremated cat, and later, her husband, only to hear a voice singing from her stomach (you can't swallow grief, she was advised); or the restaurant known as "The Air & Light," the place to be in this small coastal town that serves as the backdrop for Crace's gastronomic flights of fancy, but where no food or beverage is actually served, though a 12 percent surcharge is imposed just for just sitting there and being seen.
Food for thought in the best sense of the term, The Devil's Larder is another delectable work of fiction by a 2001 winner of The National Book Critics Circle Award.
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.
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Reviews for The Devil's Larder
68 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Sixty 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.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Sixty 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.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Wow, 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.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This 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.