The subtitle of this novel could be Confessions of a Bulimic Intellectual. There are glorious wild descriptions of food on nearly every page. An obsesThe subtitle of this novel could be Confessions of a Bulimic Intellectual. There are glorious wild descriptions of food on nearly every page. An obsession with food's smells and colors and sounds and taste all like fireworks in their vividness and their cadence. Its sentences are a nearly synesthetic paean to food and its preparation. But always along with these vivid food-sense impressions comes a coupling of descriptions of grotesque foul digestion and excrement and decay. There is no nourishment in this book that comes without the cost of corresponding filth. There is no joy without illness. There is no sex without blood. No love without death.
Reading this novel is like being force-fed a feast of words all the while knowing you'll be sick in the end. I can honestly say I fell in love with each exquisite sentence after another of this feast. I could quote whole sentences and paragraphs and chapters that left me weak-kneed with their intensity and beauty. But in the end there was no joy in this read. No sense that the author was sharing something he cared about with me, his reader. Just this, in the end: an emptiness.
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