The Devil's Larder: Short Stories - Softcover

Crace, Jim

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312420897 ISBN 13: 9780312420895

Publisher: Picador USA, 2002

Synopsis

The author's latest collection of sixty-five short stories tackles appetite, food, and desire with rare wit and lyrical beauty. By the author of Being Dead and Quarantine. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.

About this title

Review:

Jim Crace remains one of the most individual and elegant writers at work today. His books customarily defy category and the new one, The Devil's Larder, is no exception. The cover shows a sensuous female mouth crammed full of berries, with the juice running down her chin and the book's attitude to food is correspondingly erotic. The concept of a literary feast (i.e., a novel in which food is central to the structure) is not new but has never been handled with the sheer imagination and indulgence we find here.

This is a cumulative novel in 64 parts, in which the reader's cultural, culinary and sexual appetites are fully catered for in a discursive, episodic narrative. There is no plot as such, more a vividly realised series of anecdotes in which the briefly appearing characters come to life before our eyes through the indulgence of their various appetites. In these pages, a whole community and its varied inhabitants are vividly conjured by evocative fragments that coalesce into a rich tapestry. The reader may not always be sure about what is going on but the journey is highly pleasurable. We are invited to a restaurant that offers dishes going far beyond the borders of good taste; we can sample the delights of blind pie, a dish created for revenge; and we may try the fruit of the love-leaf tree that can do wonders for a relationship. The language has a Nabokov-like precision and resonance (although the refusal to deliver a straightforward narrative recalls Borges):

The atmosphere is sexual. We're in the brothel's waiting room. The menu's yet to be paraded. We do not speak. We simply wait and hike and climb. We are aroused...

--Barry Forshaw

Review:

A cumulative novel in 64 dark, unsettling tales through which Crace explores our foibles through our relationship with food. A critically acclaimed patchwork portrait of a community where meals are served with lashings of passion and recipes come spiced with unexpected challenges and hopes.

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador USA
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0312420897
• ISBN 13: 9780312420895
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 176