Molly Foust reviewed The Glutton by A. K. Blakemore
Shield your softer parts and don't eat while reading
4 stars
couldn't wait to read this one, because I read about the man who could not stop eating years ago and thought, hmmm, weird. Was he a medical abnormality? OR a 600 pound life contestant that was just ahead of his time, dropped into a land of dearth and war, dreaming of a future of full of trans fat and superstores? Voraciously brutal and peppered with such unusual verbiage that I wondered vaguely where my dictionary was and if I should be worried about my SAT scores, I considering shelving this next to my food books. How outraged my lovely books extolling the history of beans and salt and mushrooms would be, sitting next to this hapless hungry peasant, this poubelle sans fini. Surely the other books would squeeze together, vomit him onto the floor, and if they could, beat it with a stick. There was so much beating with sticks …
couldn't wait to read this one, because I read about the man who could not stop eating years ago and thought, hmmm, weird. Was he a medical abnormality? OR a 600 pound life contestant that was just ahead of his time, dropped into a land of dearth and war, dreaming of a future of full of trans fat and superstores? Voraciously brutal and peppered with such unusual verbiage that I wondered vaguely where my dictionary was and if I should be worried about my SAT scores, I considering shelving this next to my food books. How outraged my lovely books extolling the history of beans and salt and mushrooms would be, sitting next to this hapless hungry peasant, this poubelle sans fini. Surely the other books would squeeze together, vomit him onto the floor, and if they could, beat it with a stick. There was so much beating with sticks going on, so many hungry crabs in a barrell. So many injuries of the body and soul. How one could dwell in the terrible world of Tarare/late 18th century France and still wake up with enough will to go on- wow, I say. The magic is in the rendering, because writing about human misery on a small and grand scale without being too much for me to put the book down while still being too much for me to read without nausea is no easy feat. "If you are being beaten, you must curl into a ball to shield your softer parts" advises one character. I felt like I needed to shield my softer parts every damn page. The writing was too good and the story too unique to give it a poor rating, and I might even be remiss in giving it a 4, bu though the animal cruelty, the petty viciousness, the unquiet desperation. In short, it was real downer, but too weird and wrought to be dismissed. Questions I still have include, did the golden spoon kill him and isn't that a little silly? Would the rat, horse, baby, be improved with cooking? Is he a metaphor or a victim or a victim of metaphor? Why did he go evil? that did not seem to follow. I didn't need to know about the kittens though. Fuck that edit it out put it in a box three hundred feet below an active volcano and save it for another species to find.