"Debt to Pleasure"

[fiefoe]

Supposedly this is a novel masquerading as a book of essays masquerading as a cookbook, and so far it is succeeding on all three fronts without coming off as too gimmicky. In the novel, it's been amply and deftly revealed that Tarquin the narrator has issues with his brother and other kin; in the essays, we are being showered with bon mots both borrowed and original, (Swinburne's biographer on an episode involving Roman sewage systems - 'the Muse of history must draw her veil'); and in the cookbook, Tarquin talks about food with knowledge and becoming reverence.

John Lanchester, along with Alain de Botton, seems to belong to a particular British breed: a clever fellow.

• One early disaster of my brother's, .. was occasioned by the absence of the small word "plucked"- he removed from the oven a roasted but full-fledged pheasant, terrible in its hot sarcophagus of feathers.
  
• We are all familiar with the after-the-fact tone - weary, self-justificatory, aggrieved, apologetic- shared by ship captains appearing before boards of inquiry to explain how they came to run their vessels aground, and by authors composing forewords.
  
• (Counter to Roland Barthes' take on the meaning of any list of likes and dislikes), to like something is to want to ingest it, and in that sense is to submit to the world... But dislike hardens the perimeter between the self and the world, and brings a clarity to the object isolated in its light. Any dislike is in some measure a triumph of definition, distinction, and discrimination - a triumph of life.