Tarquin Winot, erudito, voluptuoso, snob y terriblemente civilizado, ha decidido escribir un libro de cocina muy poco convencional. En realidad, será un tratado a la manera de la Fisiología del gusto de Brillat-Savarin, de quien Tarquin piensa que fue, junto al Marqués de Sade, una de las grandes mentes transgresoras de su época. Pero Tarquin es un habilísimo mentiroso que, como un iceberg, esconde mucho más de lo que revela, y el sinuoso relato de este maestro del ingenio malvado, que comenzara como las refinadas reflexiones de un dandy sobre el placer, entremezcladas con exquisitas y canónicas recetas y rememoraciones acerca de los perdidos paraísos del pasado, acabará por convertirse en el ambiguo, cómicamente ominoso testimonio de alguien que ha hecho de su vida una peligrosísima obra de arte.

The ultimate in snarky, pompous narrators leads the reader through his own plot, liberally spiced with tempting recipes and twisty recollections of his own earlier life. The use of language, necessarily elevated with such a narrator, is a revelation, every sentence exactly as it should be. Brilliant. ( )

Unexpectedly funny. A good antidote if you've been reading too much euro-food porn or rapturous south of France getaway writing. I wondered how many of the quotations he slings around are true. I need to see what else he's written. ( )

A first novel by a literary journalist, which looks suspiciously as though it was written in response to a drunken challenge to incorporate the essential elements of as many stereotypical British bestsellers as possible into a single story. Cookery with recipes and menus, middle-class English people in rural France, artists, romance, servants, boarding-school, cottages in Norfolk, social snobbery, food snobbery, and — oh yes, I nearly forgot — a body-count that would put Midsomer to shame. All ruthlessly sent up via an appalling, unreliable narrator, very clever and often wickedly funny. The only thing Lanchester seems to have forgotten is that a novel like this should have a clergyman in it somewhere. Purists might also be disappointed to find that there's only one small scene of canine interest.

I'm not much of a foodie, so I suspect I missed some of the more subtle jokes, but this is obviously meant as a parody of those novels where you get a recipe in every chapter: our helpful narrator Tarquin never quite gets all the way through the essential details of a recipe before being distracted into telling us about something else, and you would probably get into a terrible mess if you were so silly as to try to reproduce any of his menus.

When it first appeared, this would have been an ideal Christmas present for those pretentious friends or relatives who are always going on about their cottage in France and the little restaurants they have "discovered" there. By now they've probably read it already, unfortunately, and they are more worried about Brexit and their 90 days than about aubergines or cheeses, but it's still good fun for a couple of hours. ( )

The debt to pleasure est un récit à la première personne d'un certain Tarquin Willot, un Anglais ayant entrepris de traverser la Manche pour se rendre dans sa maison en Provence.
Tarquin Willot a quelque chose de Humbert Humbert dans sa folie, son goût des mots, son parfait égotisme, sa manière de s'enivrer de sa propre érudition, sa misanthropie. Son obsession ne se fixe pas sur une Lolita) mais sur les plaisirs de la cuisine (le livre est parsemé de différentes recettes). Et John Lanchester, sans être pour autant Nabokov, écrit sacrément bien.
Il livre un roman très singulier, intelligent, plein d'esprit, drôle et cynique, sans aucun affect... carrément toxique.
Et c'est plutôt jubilatoire.
Méfiez-vous, la prochaine fois, que l'on vous invitera à déguster des champignons ! ( )