THE DEVIL'S LARDER is a cumulative novel in sixty-four parts, all on the subject of food. Crace's readers might learn that little is to be trusted about food from these hilarious, delightful and subversive ingredients, but they will encounter a startling and touching patchwork portrait of a community where meals are served with lashings of passion and recipes come spiced with unexpected challenges and hopes.
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Review:
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
About the Author:
Jim Crace is the author of six novels, including BEING DEAD and before that QUARANTINE which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Whitbread Novel of the Year. He is also a past winner of the Whitbread First Novel Prize, the E.M. Forster Award and the Guardian Fiction Award. He lives in Birmingham with his wife and two children.
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- PublisherPenguin UK
- Publication date2002
- ISBN 10 0140276416
- ISBN 13 9780140276411
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages208
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