Winner of the Whitbread Award for Best First Novel and a New York Times Notable Book, The Debt to Pleasure is a wickedly funny ode to food. Traveling from Portsmouth to the south of France, Tarquin Winot, the book’s snobbish narrator, instructs us in his philosophy on everything from the erotics of dislike to the psychology of the menu. Under the guise of completing a cookbook, Winot is in fact on a much more sinister mission that only gradually comes to light.
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.
stylish debut This debut novel by the British book reviewer and food critic, John Lanchester, owes a roughly equal debt to Jean-Anthelme Brillat Savarin’s The Physiology of Taste, perhaps the most revered book on cooking ever written, and to Vladimir Nabokov’s classics Lolita and Pale Fire, with a dash of Remains of the Day thrown in. The book starts out as mere “culinary reflections” by a brilliant, arrogant, pedantic, almost grotesquely loquacious Englishman named Tarquin Winot : Over…
Nearly Nabokov If you like dark comedies and find culinary arts even the least bit interesting, read this marvelous first novel from John Lanchester.I truly wish I could tell you that John Lanchester’s _The Debt to Pleasure_ is a 5 star wonder, but I just can’t. Lanchester’s protagonist and narrator, Tarquin Winot, certainly pans the breadth of the author’s vocabulary, erudition, and culinary knowledge, and _Debt_ is a spectacular premier effort.Reading through the first few chapters, I noticed a…
Leaves you hungry for more John Lanchester gives us a study in pretentiousness, self-denial and deranged envy that would sit proudly on any psychologist’s bookshelves, while keeping the reader gripped in this most unusual novel.Part travelogue, part diary, part recipe book… wholly entertaining. All that and elements of a whodunnit turned on its head make this one of the most interesting books you’ll read for a long time.What starts off, apparently, as the snobbish diary of a nobody becomes…