This description may have — once or twice in the course of 50+ years of, conscious, eating — been aimed in my general direction. But I’m no match for the appetite (or range of food-stuffs eaten) of the protagonist, Tarare, in AK Blakemore’s new book, “The Glutton”, which is based on a real-life story of a trencherman peasant in revolutionary France and which has been described as
“…this hallucinatory tale is set to be one of the most remarkable novels of the year.”
There’s a feel of Bosch in the description of the book, of the characters, of the milieu of that time, even though this lovely, lovely piece of art was painted almost 300 years before the events in France.
Even more apposite is this ‘slice’ detail from the larger one above; the centre-piece eater could have been based on Tarare.
I can’t wait to read this book It seems to me — albeit not here yet and therefore unread so far — to almost be a metonym for the appetite (“eating their children”) for killing unleashed (and found to be almost un-containable) by and of the peasants after the French Revolution started rolling along its deadly course.
The Grauniad review finishes with this phrase:
Would that I could live with praise like that…