Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #299676 in Books
• Published on: 2002-07-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Amazon.co.uk 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...

Synopsis
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.

Customer Reviews

Not enough meat!
I didn't like this book. The stories were all a bit strange and far too short for you to get into. The last story being only 2 words long!. The stories were all written in a poetic way and i just didnt feel i enjoyed any of them. Not my cup of tea.

Ingenious
Sometimes you don't need a traditional narrative of beginning, middle and end. Sometimes an insightful commentary on a character's actions in two paragraphs will do.

Jim Crace's ingenious collection of situations, characters and stories are neat, potted commentaries and descriptions which use the theme of food to illustrate bigger ideas. He often doesn't complicate the issue by building up a story and character when this is not required, but he will drop us right in the middle of a situation, with no loss of atmosphere and detail, and draw out a brief and effective allegory.

Crace plays with the format of the short story in a way which matches the way we deal with things everyday, drawing inference, moral and conclusion in the things that we see and experience. That is why it is so effective.

If music be the food of love - let's eat it
My thoughts when only a brief way through The Devil's Larder were that it would be easy pickings. Short bursts of prose, 64 "chapters" in 190 pages meaning that none outstays its welcome. And as always Crace's legends had the tang of truth to them, which displayed considerable talent as they are two removes from truth - myths which aren't even real myths. Very moreish.

Or so I thought. Picking it up again after an unnatural hiatus brought on by the World Trade Center attack - when books were put down, and TV became *the thing* - I'm afraid The Devil's Larder finally turned to ashes in my mouth. I could say, accurately, that reading gluttonous, lustful, avaricious prose seemed somehow fraudulent in the immediate aftermath, but I admit that even on its own undoubted merits, my enthusiasm for it was beginning to wane. Despite Crace's pre-emptive protests that The Devil's Larder is a novel because it has "unity of theme, unity of style, unity of setting - everything except unity of character," I know a glorified (albeit glorious) book of stories when I see it. And I'm looking at one right now.

However hard you try, it's hard to make people want to read 64 "chapters" in a row - ranging from two words to 10 pages - without either a plot to follow or at least one character to root for, frown upon or squirm with. The problem with The Devil's Larder is that, although some of the stories do contain interesting twists or developments, they're all narrated effectively in parenthesis, the kind of thing that would usually be one character's aside or prehistory, swagged in subquotation marks. There is, to appropriate a crashingly obvious food metaphor (but at least applaud me for keeping them to a minimum), nothing to get your teeth into. At least it's only waffer-theen and won't detain you long.

The Devil's Larder then is fine in small doses, is (what the hell) an aperitif, an appetizer of bite-size chunks for the main courses of Arcadia, Quarantine, Signals of Distress and Being Dead. Chow down on those instead.