Devil's Larder
- Book Review,
by Jim Crace
Amazon.com
In The Devil's Larder, Jim Crace has put together an odd and artful little volume that encompasses more of the human experience than it really ought to, given its size and scope. Crace presents us with 64 short fictions about food, which add up to a picture of life that is at once diabolical and innocent, creepily sexualized and free of judgment. In one fable, a mother and her small daughter twist their tongues together, ferreting out the food in each other's mouths: they want to know if food tastes the same from another person's tongue. A game of strip fondue ends with guests covered in burns where the molten cheese has fallen onto their naked flesh. "A gasp of pain. The whiff of sizzling flesh and hair and cheese." Flesh and cheese, that's the stuff. Crace shows us the odd outer limits of desire, and revels in the sheer weirdness of the daily act of eating. --Claire Dederer
From Publishers Weekly
The line between nature and culture, according to Levi-Strauss, runs through our kitchens between the raw and the cooked. In Crace's book of 64 food fables, the raw and the cooked are sequenced in sometimes bizarre ways: a woman remembers her mother's version of "soup stone," its magic ingredient a stone found on the seashore; a famous restaurant in an isolated Third World locale becomes chic by supplying appetizers of "soft-bodied spiders, swag beetles, forest roaches" and, as a main dish, the famous Curry No. 3, which is rumored to contain human meat; researchers discover a food additive that causes sudden, unmotivated laughter and try it out at a waterfront restaurant on unsuspecting tourists. The gnomic pronouncements that often initiate these stories caan be strained. Not only is it not true that "there is no greater pleasure than to be expected at a meal and not arrive," it is not the kind of claim that leads us into an interesting paradox or thought experiment. Other pieces are successful at evoking the powerful childhood associations of food. A story about a boy whose neighbor becomes a suburban Thoreau, living outside, angling in a river, excreting on what he grows and then eating it and handing it out to be eaten by others, expresses elegantly the child's perception of the alien as both frightening and perversely fascinating. These fables are five-finger exercises simple, enjoyable, but lacking in depth. (Oct.)Forecast: Crace's previous novel, Quarantine, won the Whitbread Award, and Being Dead won a National Book Critics Circle Award. His latest is a diversion, but its subject matter and elegant jacket art may appeal to those who know Crace by reputation but were scared away by the grimmer themes of Quarantine and Being Dead. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
As evidenced by Being Dead, his National Book Critics Circle award winner, Crace is adept at creating unexpected worlds. In this tasty little collection, he has created many 64, to be exact. From the grandmother who tears off a bit of dough "for the angel" to the adventurers who risk a tiresome, slightly surreal hike to dine at an inexplicably famous restaurant to the manager who devises an ultimately self-defeating means of keeping his waiters from sampling what they are serving. Crace's tales all concern the relationship between people and food. Quirky, unsettling, and sometimes slightly macabre, these aren't stories, exactly; few run more than a page and a half, and the last one consists of two (admittedly loaded) words: "Oh honey." Instead, they are little scenes that capture the oddness of being human from a particular angle. This is not the big Crace we are waiting for after Being Dead each of his novels really is an event but is will certainly hold us. For larger literary collections in public and academic libraries.- Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal" Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Whenever Crace's imagination alights on a topic, the reader is rewarded with a gem of a book, and this time the topic, broadly speaking, is food. Crace explores the complexities of human nature, as well as its foibles, in 64 short fiction pieces (many of them short-shorts, actually) that cover the full gastronomic range, from soup to nuts. The stories are set in a fictional coastal town and the surrounding countryside, wherein we find legends, myths, miracles, eccentricities, class warfare, fast-talking spongers, remembrances of delicious home-cooked meals, and, caveat emptor, death and illness from food poisoning. That the pieces never flag is a tribute to Crace's ability to overlay the voices of a multitude of narrators with a fine patina of wryness. Organic food is not so benign as our prepackaged world has taught us to believe, yet the book's revelation is a truth each of us lives and repeats every day of our lives: food is the one thing we both take for granted and exalt. Frank Caso
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"One of the brightest lights in contemporary British fiction"--Charles Johnson, The New York Times Book Review
Review
"One of the brightest lights in contemporary British fiction"--Charles Johnson, The New York Times Book Review
Review
"One of the brightest lights in contemporary British fiction"--Charles Johnson, The New York Times Book Review
Book Description
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.
Download Description
A scintillating stew of sixty short fictions about appetite, food, and the objects of our desire
About the Author
Jim Crace is the author, most recently, of Quarantine, which won the 1997 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Being Dead, which was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 2000. His novels have been translated into fourteen languages. He lives in Birmingham, England.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Excerpt from The Devil's Larder by Jim Crace. Copyright © 2003 by Jim Crace. To be published in October, 2001 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.
Someone has taken of--and lost--the label on the can. There are two glassy lines of glue with just a trace of stripped paper where the label was attached. The can's batch number--RG2JD 19547--is embossed on one of the ends. Top or bottom end? No one can tell what's up or down. The metal isn't very old.
They do not like to throw it out. It might be salmon--not cheap. Or tuna steaks. Or rings of syruped pineapple. Too good to waste. Guava halves. Lychees. Leek soup. Skinned Italian plum tomatoes. Of course, they ought to open up the can and have a look, and eat the contents there and then. Or plan a meal around it. It must be something that they like, or used to like. It's in their larder. It had a label once. They chose it in the shop.
They shake the can up against their ears. They sniff at it. They compare it with the other cans inside the larder to find a match in size and shape. But still they cannot tell if it is beans or fruit or fish. They are like children with unopened birthday gifts. Will they be disappointed when they open up the can? Will it be what they want? Sometimes their humour is macabre: the contents are beyond description--baby flesh, sliced fingers, dog waste, worms, the venom of a hundred mambas--and that is why there is no label.
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." A plague. Should they open up and spoon it out? A tune, canned music, something never heard before that would rise from the open can, evaporate, and not be heard again. The elixir of youth. The human soup of DNA. A devil or a god?
It's tempting just to stab it with a knife. Wound it. See how it bleeds. What is the colour of the blood? What is its taste?
We all should have a can like this. Let it rust. Let the rims turn rough and brown. Lift it up and shake it if you want. Shake its sweetness or its bitterness. Agitate the juicy heaviness within. The gravy heaviness. The brine, the soup, the oil, the sauce. The heaviness. The choice is wounding it with knives, or never touching it again.
2
"This is for the angel," Grandma used to say, tearing off a strip of dough for me to take into the yard. "Leave it somewhere he can see." Sometimes I left the strip on the street wall. Sometimes I draped it on the washing line. Sometimes I put it on the outside windowsill and hid behind the kitchen curtain beads to spot the angel in the yard.
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