Several take the form of generic character contrast: a woman who finds love in middle age simultaneously develops the healthy appetite denied the withdrawn younger woman listening to her story a private club’s dining-room manager punishes his staff for the same breaches of etiquette he finds himself compulsively committing and a truculent, self-denying health faddist who preached that “Migraines are occasioned by modern life” is remembered by the jaded voluptuary who long outlives her.
The award-winning British author of such inventive and memorable fiction as Quarantine (1997) and Being Dead (2000) enters new territory with this beguiling collection of 64 very short stories about what may as well be called the metaphysics of food.Ĭrace prefaces these untitled pieces with a tantalizing pseudo-biblical epigraph including the orotund declaration, “Nor is there honey in the devil’s larder.” Then he treats us to freely ranging anecdotes (some a single paragraph, none more than a half-dozen pages) that dramatize with terse wit the exigencies of appetite and custom as expressed in both seemingly realistic and expressly parabolic terms.
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