Only gradually, insidiously, do the outlines of a distinctly quirky aesthetic and a highly eccentric moral philosophy emerge, until the truth becomes unavoidable: This is not the voluptuary’s memoir it purports to be, and Tarquin Winot is a master of something more than wit and opinion, something infinitely, quiveringly, sinister. As Tarquin peels away the layers of his past, he proves himself a master of sly wit and subversive ideas. An Englishman of indeterminate age whose spiritual home has always been France, Tarquin 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 British palate, from cheese as “the corpse of milk” to the binding action of blood. This is not a murder mystery but a chronological inquest into why an acutely intelligent, gifted and cultured, pampered and successful gentleman becomes a serial murderer. ‘”This is not a conventional cookbook….” So begins John Lanchester’s astonishing debut novel in which the impeccably correct Tarquin Winot relates the story of his life through that most basic and sublime of human passions: Food.
Snobbish Tarquin Winot sets out on a journey of the senses from the Hotel Splendide in Portsmouth to his. An impeccable, Epicurean Englishman and lifelong Francophile recounts his past pleasures in Provence, in a meditation on food, vodka, and restaurant-going that becomes a dark satire on hedonism. Dust jacket has light edge and cover wear sticker ghost on front. The debt to pleasure: a novel (Unknown) Description. McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, 1996, 1 st Canadian Ed/1 st pr.
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