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Дългът към удоволствието
Тарквин Уинът, англичанин на неопределена възраст и с благородно потекло, е голям гастроном, отличен разказвач, сластолюбец с безупречен вкус и невероятна ерудиция. Освен това е напълно луд, а историята му, разказана през призмата на онази основна и висша човешка страст - любовта към изтънчено приготвената храна, - е истински литературен деликатес за хората с чувствително небце и вкус към по-изисканите неща в живота.
239 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1996
182 people are currently reading
4876 people want to read
About the author
John Lanchester
35 books597 followersJohn Lanchester is the author of four novels and three books of non-fiction. He was born in Germany and moved to Hong Kong. He studied in UK. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and was awarded the 2008 E.M. Forster Award. He lives in London.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 495 reviews
February 24, 2013
Not Your Typical Lad
This is an odd little book, but one that is hugely rewarding.
There is a trend in English writing towards "lad lit", by way of imitation of "chick lit".
Most chick lit that I’ve read (e.g., Kathy Lette – nobody does upwardly mobile English bourgeois quite like an Australian) seems to be at home in its genre, whereas most lad lit seems to me to be lost in imitation, as if the author was writing down to this level, while waiting to be discovered and offered the opportunity to write something more ambitious and literary.
Otherwise intelligent men descend upon this genre in the hope of generating some fame and filthy lucre (which might fund their indulgence in literary fiction), whereas women engage in it as either writer or reader with a sincerity and pleasure that men cannot seem to match.
"The Debt to Pleasure" is not quite lad lit. John Lanchester is made of Sterner stuff. He has been restaurant critic of the Guardian and deputy editor of the London Review of Books. He has a formidable intellect and presumably has a qualification akin to a Classics Degree from Oxford. He knows about food and alcohol (as does any quality journalist), but like the best authors he knows both how to write and how others write and have written before him. He also has a wicked sense of humour.
The Cook, the Critic, the Brother and His Biographer
Lanchester’s first person narrator, Tarquin Winot, is an entertaining and erudite food critic.
For about half of the novel, he outlines some favourite menus and tells wonderful stories about each course. If you’re a foodie, he’s just the sort of person you might love to sit next to at a dinner party.
Only, as he reveals more about himself, you start to realise there might be a reason he seems to have no spouse or partner. In the second half, we see him flirting shamelessly with Laura, the young female biographer of his sculptor brother, Bartholomew. His authority diminishes as he demeans himself and he becomes a more and more unreliable narrator.
Tarquin Winot has been compared with Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert. My reading of "Lolita" might be flawed, but I never felt that Humbert was unreliable. I felt that he was telling his truth and that it was transparent right from the beginning, even if it was distasteful.
Tarquin descends in our esteem the more we learn about him. If by half way through the novel we feel that we have befriended him, by the end of the novel we question our judgement and want to scamper away with our tail between our legs. I read the novel in 24 hours and, to the extent that my relationship with Tarquin was a one-night stand, it was one I regretted in the morning, at least metaphorically.
The Raw and the Cooked
The novel is easy to read, but there is a nice sophistication working beneath the surface.
On the one hand, it explores the cultural rivalry between French idealism and English empiricism, not just in food, but in philosophy, art and literature.
On the other hand, it works within a structuralist framework suggested by Claude Lévi-Strauss, that of the raw and the cooked.
In the novel, the cooked is civilized, while the raw is primitive or barbaric.
The first half of the novel is founded on formally structured menus. However, in the second half, the structure is abandoned, order breaks down, and relaxation, spontaneity and chaos take over.
Events descend into what the French, the Italians and the Americans would respectively call a debacle, a fiasco or a fuck-up.
Civilisation requires structure, we must be cooked and served in the correct sequence. If we seek psychic liberation, if we are only half-cooked, we, men in particular, will go off, like Tarquin, half-cocked.
Nevertheless, Lanchester quotes Walter Benjamin (without expressly identifying the source of the quotation) to the effect that “Every act of civilization is also an act of barbarism.” Perhaps, the distinction between civilization and barbarism is illusory? Perhaps, Tarquin symolises the illusion?
Eros and Thanatos, Love and Death
At first, Tarquin embodies the qualities of a sophisticated and knowledgeable bon vivant, one who enjoys the good life. By the end of the novel, he is quite the opposite.
Tarquin recalls a conversation with his sculptor brother in which he (Tarquin) contrasts the artist with the murderer:
"...one of the impulses which underlies all art is the desire to make a permanent impact on the world, to leave a trace of selfhood behind…to leave a memento of himself...
"The murderer, though, is better adapted to the reality and to the aesthetics of the modern world, because instead of leaving a presence behind him – the achieved work, whether in the form of a painting or a book or a daubed signature – he leaves behind him something just as final and just as achieved: an absence. Where somebody used to be, now nobody is.
"What more irrefutable proof of one’s having lived can there be than to have taken a human life and replaced it with nothingness, with a few fading memories?"
Das Ich und das Essen
Tarquin continues:
"If the artist’s first desire is to leave something behind him, his next is simply to take up more space – to earn a disproportionate amount of the world’s attention. This is routinely called ‘ego’, but that term is far too mundane to encompass the raging, megalomaniacal desire, the greed, the human deficiency that underpins the creation of everything from a Matisse papercut to a Faberge egg...
"...[the truth] is not that the megalomaniac is a failed artist but that the artist is a timid megalomaniac, venting himself in the easy sphere of fantasy rather than the unforgiving arena of real life…
“Why don’t people take Bakunin more seriously? Destruction is as great a passion as creation, and it is as creative, too – as visionary and as assertive of the self."
And so he concludes:
"The artist is the oyster and the murderer is the pearl."
It’s interesting that this philosophical and aesthetic debate occurs within the framework of food.
It’s almost as if the self is the Ego (das Ich) and everything else external, but food and alcohol that we consume, in particular, is the Id (or das Es).
To stretch the credibility of the argument even further, in German, Tarquin pluralises das Es, until it becomes das Essen (i.e., food).
I am what I eat, I do what I eat, and red meat implies a capacity to kill in order to survive.
Not Just Desserts
While "The Debt to Pleasure" is as entertaining, if not more so, than most English lad lit, it also reveals that Lanchester can write.
If nothing else, he has admirable influences.
While some might find the comparisons odious, I would place this very English novel midway between the French Marcel Proust (1) and the American Paul Auster, with a large dollop of Nabokovian playfulness and a sprinkling of Peter Greenaway.
I’m looking forward to his later works, including "Capital".
(1) One sentence occupies the whole of pages 198 and 199, only it flows so well in the Proustian manner, you don’t notice its length, until you get to the end of it (TWSS, anyway).
W.H. Auden's Martini
Tarquin Winot: "As a subsequent refinement [on the seven-to-one martini of Beefeater gin and Noilly Prat vermouth of my aesthetic period], I borrowed W.H. Auden's technique of mixing the vermouth and gin at lunchtime...and leaving the mixture in the freezer to attain that wonderful jellified texture of alcohol chilled to below the point at which water freezes...the Auden martini is not diluted in any way...a 'silver bullet'."
In Search of Auden's Martini
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/artic...
W.H. Auden's Martini Haiku
Could any tiger
Drink martinis, smoke cigars,
And last as we do?
Heston Blumenthal's Version of Apicius' First Century Recipe for Calf's Brains with Rose Petals
http://www.channel4.com/4food/recipes...
"The Imperfect Enjoyment" by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
This is the poem from which the title of the novel was derived:
http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/...
The Debt to Pleasure
Once is not enough,
Why does heat desert your flame?
Is there then no more?
This is an odd little book, but one that is hugely rewarding.
There is a trend in English writing towards "lad lit", by way of imitation of "chick lit".
Most chick lit that I’ve read (e.g., Kathy Lette – nobody does upwardly mobile English bourgeois quite like an Australian) seems to be at home in its genre, whereas most lad lit seems to me to be lost in imitation, as if the author was writing down to this level, while waiting to be discovered and offered the opportunity to write something more ambitious and literary.
Otherwise intelligent men descend upon this genre in the hope of generating some fame and filthy lucre (which might fund their indulgence in literary fiction), whereas women engage in it as either writer or reader with a sincerity and pleasure that men cannot seem to match.
"The Debt to Pleasure" is not quite lad lit. John Lanchester is made of Sterner stuff. He has been restaurant critic of the Guardian and deputy editor of the London Review of Books. He has a formidable intellect and presumably has a qualification akin to a Classics Degree from Oxford. He knows about food and alcohol (as does any quality journalist), but like the best authors he knows both how to write and how others write and have written before him. He also has a wicked sense of humour.
The Cook, the Critic, the Brother and His Biographer
Lanchester’s first person narrator, Tarquin Winot, is an entertaining and erudite food critic.
For about half of the novel, he outlines some favourite menus and tells wonderful stories about each course. If you’re a foodie, he’s just the sort of person you might love to sit next to at a dinner party.
Only, as he reveals more about himself, you start to realise there might be a reason he seems to have no spouse or partner. In the second half, we see him flirting shamelessly with Laura, the young female biographer of his sculptor brother, Bartholomew. His authority diminishes as he demeans himself and he becomes a more and more unreliable narrator.
Tarquin Winot has been compared with Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert. My reading of "Lolita" might be flawed, but I never felt that Humbert was unreliable. I felt that he was telling his truth and that it was transparent right from the beginning, even if it was distasteful.
Tarquin descends in our esteem the more we learn about him. If by half way through the novel we feel that we have befriended him, by the end of the novel we question our judgement and want to scamper away with our tail between our legs. I read the novel in 24 hours and, to the extent that my relationship with Tarquin was a one-night stand, it was one I regretted in the morning, at least metaphorically.
The Raw and the Cooked
The novel is easy to read, but there is a nice sophistication working beneath the surface.
On the one hand, it explores the cultural rivalry between French idealism and English empiricism, not just in food, but in philosophy, art and literature.
On the other hand, it works within a structuralist framework suggested by Claude Lévi-Strauss, that of the raw and the cooked.
In the novel, the cooked is civilized, while the raw is primitive or barbaric.
The first half of the novel is founded on formally structured menus. However, in the second half, the structure is abandoned, order breaks down, and relaxation, spontaneity and chaos take over.
Events descend into what the French, the Italians and the Americans would respectively call a debacle, a fiasco or a fuck-up.
Civilisation requires structure, we must be cooked and served in the correct sequence. If we seek psychic liberation, if we are only half-cooked, we, men in particular, will go off, like Tarquin, half-cocked.
Nevertheless, Lanchester quotes Walter Benjamin (without expressly identifying the source of the quotation) to the effect that “Every act of civilization is also an act of barbarism.” Perhaps, the distinction between civilization and barbarism is illusory? Perhaps, Tarquin symolises the illusion?
Eros and Thanatos, Love and Death
At first, Tarquin embodies the qualities of a sophisticated and knowledgeable bon vivant, one who enjoys the good life. By the end of the novel, he is quite the opposite.
Tarquin recalls a conversation with his sculptor brother in which he (Tarquin) contrasts the artist with the murderer:
"...one of the impulses which underlies all art is the desire to make a permanent impact on the world, to leave a trace of selfhood behind…to leave a memento of himself...
"The murderer, though, is better adapted to the reality and to the aesthetics of the modern world, because instead of leaving a presence behind him – the achieved work, whether in the form of a painting or a book or a daubed signature – he leaves behind him something just as final and just as achieved: an absence. Where somebody used to be, now nobody is.
"What more irrefutable proof of one’s having lived can there be than to have taken a human life and replaced it with nothingness, with a few fading memories?"
Das Ich und das Essen
Tarquin continues:
"If the artist’s first desire is to leave something behind him, his next is simply to take up more space – to earn a disproportionate amount of the world’s attention. This is routinely called ‘ego’, but that term is far too mundane to encompass the raging, megalomaniacal desire, the greed, the human deficiency that underpins the creation of everything from a Matisse papercut to a Faberge egg...
"...[the truth] is not that the megalomaniac is a failed artist but that the artist is a timid megalomaniac, venting himself in the easy sphere of fantasy rather than the unforgiving arena of real life…
“Why don’t people take Bakunin more seriously? Destruction is as great a passion as creation, and it is as creative, too – as visionary and as assertive of the self."
And so he concludes:
"The artist is the oyster and the murderer is the pearl."
It’s interesting that this philosophical and aesthetic debate occurs within the framework of food.
It’s almost as if the self is the Ego (das Ich) and everything else external, but food and alcohol that we consume, in particular, is the Id (or das Es).
To stretch the credibility of the argument even further, in German, Tarquin pluralises das Es, until it becomes das Essen (i.e., food).
I am what I eat, I do what I eat, and red meat implies a capacity to kill in order to survive.
Not Just Desserts
While "The Debt to Pleasure" is as entertaining, if not more so, than most English lad lit, it also reveals that Lanchester can write.
If nothing else, he has admirable influences.
While some might find the comparisons odious, I would place this very English novel midway between the French Marcel Proust (1) and the American Paul Auster, with a large dollop of Nabokovian playfulness and a sprinkling of Peter Greenaway.
I’m looking forward to his later works, including "Capital".
(1) One sentence occupies the whole of pages 198 and 199, only it flows so well in the Proustian manner, you don’t notice its length, until you get to the end of it (TWSS, anyway).
W.H. Auden's Martini
Tarquin Winot: "As a subsequent refinement [on the seven-to-one martini of Beefeater gin and Noilly Prat vermouth of my aesthetic period], I borrowed W.H. Auden's technique of mixing the vermouth and gin at lunchtime...and leaving the mixture in the freezer to attain that wonderful jellified texture of alcohol chilled to below the point at which water freezes...the Auden martini is not diluted in any way...a 'silver bullet'."
In Search of Auden's Martini
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/artic...
W.H. Auden's Martini Haiku
Could any tiger
Drink martinis, smoke cigars,
And last as we do?
Heston Blumenthal's Version of Apicius' First Century Recipe for Calf's Brains with Rose Petals
http://www.channel4.com/4food/recipes...
"The Imperfect Enjoyment" by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
This is the poem from which the title of the novel was derived:
http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/...
The Debt to Pleasure
Once is not enough,
Why does heat desert your flame?
Is there then no more?
April 30, 2012
I wanted to love this book. It was highly recommended by a co-worker who is one of only a few passionate readers I know in real life. The writing style was elaborate and pretentious, the sentences overlong, rambling and wordy. Many passages were darkly humorous and the food descriptions were mouth-watering. The main character was clearly disturbed. If you are paying enough attention (I wasn't always), then you will find clues early on as to how disturbed he is. Yet, I am not interested enough in continuing. At this stage, I'll skim quickly to the end so I can at least attempt to have an intelligent discussion with my co-worker and then move on to something more engaging.
May 27, 2013
Quirky and inventive novel, which is well worth the effort of persisting with the pompous and irritating narrator. Tarquin Winot is a foodie and is not all that he seems. The blurb on the back of the book indicates that. Also anyone who changes hia name from Rodney to Tarquin does have identity problems. It is a sort of Mrs Beeton meets American Psycho.
The food talk is actually very interesting and Lanchester clearly knows his stuff (he ought to as he has been a restaurant critic for the Observer). The recipes sound delicious and seductive; the ragu, Irish Stew and ratatouille stand out. Tarquin is a marvellous literary creation and Lanchaester has his snobbery just right. He compares the English penchant for having mint sauce with Lamb to their penchant for flagellation and cryptic crosswords; not a juxtaposition that had ever occured to me before!
Is Tarquin and unreliable narrator? I think it may be more subtle than that; he is a seductive narrator. He builds the layers gradually; an aesthete, but he draws in rather than misleads. It is clear from early on that our narrator is seriously disturbed and you can see the ending from some distance. There is a facination wondering if you know what he is really up to and how he's going to achieve his goal. Note to Mr Easton Ellis; less is more and works better.
This is a clever study of the seriously deranged, surrounded by lush descriptions of the French countryside and its cuisine. The novel flows easily and is very well written. It is original and interesting.
The food talk is actually very interesting and Lanchester clearly knows his stuff (he ought to as he has been a restaurant critic for the Observer). The recipes sound delicious and seductive; the ragu, Irish Stew and ratatouille stand out. Tarquin is a marvellous literary creation and Lanchaester has his snobbery just right. He compares the English penchant for having mint sauce with Lamb to their penchant for flagellation and cryptic crosswords; not a juxtaposition that had ever occured to me before!
Is Tarquin and unreliable narrator? I think it may be more subtle than that; he is a seductive narrator. He builds the layers gradually; an aesthete, but he draws in rather than misleads. It is clear from early on that our narrator is seriously disturbed and you can see the ending from some distance. There is a facination wondering if you know what he is really up to and how he's going to achieve his goal. Note to Mr Easton Ellis; less is more and works better.
This is a clever study of the seriously deranged, surrounded by lush descriptions of the French countryside and its cuisine. The novel flows easily and is very well written. It is original and interesting.
September 7, 2016
Tarquin Winot, the snobby Francophile who narrates John Lanchester’s debut novel, has a voice reminiscent of Oliver in Julian Barnes’s Talking It Over and Love etc. His opinionated, verbose speech provides much of the book’s wit. “This is not a conventional cookbook,” the first line warns, but a foodie’s tribute to the traditional English and French dishes that compose the best seasonal menus. For winter he suggests blinis with sour cream and caviar, Irish stew and Queen of Puddings. Spring prompts variations on the theme of lamb: “lamb and apricots are one of those combinations which exist together in a relation that is not just complementary but that seems to partake of a higher order of inevitability – a taste which exists in the mind of God,” he rhapsodizes. And yes, he includes recipes.
But as we travel with Tarquin from Portsmouth to Provence we begin to learn more about this peculiar character through the memories the dishes elicit: about his Irish nanny, his sculptor brother’s boarding school years, and so on. Lanchester very subtly introduces notes of doubt about the narrator’s reliability, until we have to wonder how much his tale resembles Patrick Süskind’s Perfume or Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley. I might have preferred an epilogue that gets outside Tarquin’s head and gives some objective facts, but that’s a minor quibble about an otherwise deliciously clever, sinuous novel.
But as we travel with Tarquin from Portsmouth to Provence we begin to learn more about this peculiar character through the memories the dishes elicit: about his Irish nanny, his sculptor brother’s boarding school years, and so on. Lanchester very subtly introduces notes of doubt about the narrator’s reliability, until we have to wonder how much his tale resembles Patrick Süskind’s Perfume or Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley. I might have preferred an epilogue that gets outside Tarquin’s head and gives some objective facts, but that’s a minor quibble about an otherwise deliciously clever, sinuous novel.
September 27, 2007
One of my favorite books of all time - the writing is wonderful, as long as you are okay with a tendency toward the stream-of-consciousness style and the use of a lot of big words. As off-putting as that may sound, Lanchester never misuses words - I just had to mention it because a friend said this is why he didn't like the book. So yes there are some words you MAY have to look up.
I go back and re-read this book all the time. He gets the tone of the effete foodie just right.
I go back and re-read this book all the time. He gets the tone of the effete foodie just right.
May 2, 2020
For many years I would have told anyone who would listen that this was my favorite book, or at least one of my favorite books, of all time. I'm sure if you unearthed my ancient, cobwebbed MySpace profile (even my FRIENDSTER profile, for God's sake) this book would have been front and center in my "What I Like" area. That said, I realized recently it had been over a decade since I read it last and I should probably check in and see if I even liked it at all anymore.
GUYS, I DO. I REALLY, REALLY DO.
If you are fan of unreliable, difficult narrators (I am) then this book is for you. If you are fan of food, cooking, or have ever referred to yourself as, or had others refer to you as, a "foodie", even better. This book makes me LAUGH and it also makes me cringe, and it bums me out, and it scares me. It's just fun, and dark, and smart.
NB: Don't skim. It occasionally gets hard not to, he's a verbose guy, but the story unfolds in surprise fits and starts, sometimes with a shocking sentence buried in the middle of nowhere.
GUYS, I DO. I REALLY, REALLY DO.
If you are fan of unreliable, difficult narrators (I am) then this book is for you. If you are fan of food, cooking, or have ever referred to yourself as, or had others refer to you as, a "foodie", even better. This book makes me LAUGH and it also makes me cringe, and it bums me out, and it scares me. It's just fun, and dark, and smart.
NB: Don't skim. It occasionally gets hard not to, he's a verbose guy, but the story unfolds in surprise fits and starts, sometimes with a shocking sentence buried in the middle of nowhere.
February 20, 2022
(3.5) The Debt to Pleasure was one of those books (like
Spider
last year) that I’ve long been aware of, never read, but always had a feeling I would enjoy. And I did enjoy it – though it wasn’t quite as much of a success as Spider, and I’m erring on the side of generosity with my rating. Written as an elaborate, literary cookbook, it tells the life story of a man named Tarquin Winot, who fancies himself a glamorous, successful and beloved aesthete but whose truth – revealed through his own words – is something rather different. This sort of sinister unravelling of an unreliable narrator is always appealing to me; Lanchester’s is a wittier approach than, say, Perfume or American Psycho, with Tarquin writing in a flowery parody of Nabokovian prose. I prefer my fictional psychopaths a little more self-aware: Tarquin is so thoroughly delusional that even as the true extent of his villainy becomes clear, it’s difficult to find him truly menacing. And I realise this is an absolutely stupid complaint, but there is just too much food writing. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the journey.
TinyLetter | Linktree
TinyLetter | Linktree
September 30, 2007
I read about this book on the web as I was googling Iain Pears; what a lucky coincidence! This is an incrediby original and engrossing book; a monologue by one of the most colorful, eccentric and deranged fictional characters I have come across in a very long time. The narrator is a food critic and incidentally a madman, with an irresistible sense of humor, quite a combination. He peppers his life narrative with some interesting recipes and menus. Of course, as he gets caught up in his story, the truth becomes clearer, a very chilling truth at that...
March 29, 2013
What a delicious, sick, twisted, and unique book this was. Let me try to describe: OK first of all, it is a work of fiction (I mean, I sure hope it is!!). It's a psychological expose, wrapped in a memoir, wrapped in a cookbook.
Got that?
It sounds like it makes no sense, but it all fits together once you get into it. The narrator thinks he's writing a cookbook, but he admits up front that there are liberal amounts of memoir thrown in there... stories about his childhood, his current life, his thoughts on life, art, and people. So there's a lot about food, but there's even more about his life and thoughts.
Then it starts getting creepier... and creepier... and creepier. He starts letting details slip that indicate that he is not the most stable person. Eventually, slowly, you realize he is a total psychopath.
Besides what I think is a totally genius concept, the narrator is a true character--think Ignatius Reilly from 'A Confederacy of Dunces.' Actually, the book this most reminded me of (in terms of tone) is Muriel Barbary's 'The Elegance of the Hedgehog.' Our book club read this, and it was one of those books that you either loved or hated. I loved it, and loved this book too, so let "Elegance" be a guideline to you! Due to the main character's personality (uber-intellectual, condescending of everyone but himself, but extremely clever and witty) I definitely think this book would not appeal to everyone. But for those it does appeal to, it's a rare treat. I thoroughly savored reading this weirdo's snooty, opinionated, off-kilter thoughts on various things.
Got that?
It sounds like it makes no sense, but it all fits together once you get into it. The narrator thinks he's writing a cookbook, but he admits up front that there are liberal amounts of memoir thrown in there... stories about his childhood, his current life, his thoughts on life, art, and people. So there's a lot about food, but there's even more about his life and thoughts.
Then it starts getting creepier... and creepier... and creepier. He starts letting details slip that indicate that he is not the most stable person. Eventually, slowly, you realize he is a total psychopath.
Besides what I think is a totally genius concept, the narrator is a true character--think Ignatius Reilly from 'A Confederacy of Dunces.' Actually, the book this most reminded me of (in terms of tone) is Muriel Barbary's 'The Elegance of the Hedgehog.' Our book club read this, and it was one of those books that you either loved or hated. I loved it, and loved this book too, so let "Elegance" be a guideline to you! Due to the main character's personality (uber-intellectual, condescending of everyone but himself, but extremely clever and witty) I definitely think this book would not appeal to everyone. But for those it does appeal to, it's a rare treat. I thoroughly savored reading this weirdo's snooty, opinionated, off-kilter thoughts on various things.
January 6, 2014
I found the extreme erudition irritating and making progress felt like running through mud, until my denseness caught up with the irony. This is written in the 1st person by the egocentric, self-absorbed, bombastically intellectual main character, Tarquin Winot. The hyper sophistication of the writing is wrapped around Tarquin's obsession with food and cuisine and the unfolding exposition of his life story. Each chapter has a meal choice at its centre, with some fascinating insights into foods and their effects and history. At the same time, at a very carefully measured pace, the story ekes out more and more dark insights into Tarquin. It starts with gentle irritation at his prissy bombast, then it turns into a nagging sense that all is not right with him, and then slowly the full horror of his personality becomes clear. It's a brilliant and original piece of writing, but I did have to persevere through the first half to 'get' the book, at which point I was fascinated, enjoying the dark humour and totally engaged.
December 29, 2018
Very funny, very clever, and very very dark. It's impossible to say much about the book without giving everything away. So it's probably best to give a few quotes to give an idea of this monstrous ego:
"I myself have always disliked being called a 'genius'. It is fascinating to notice how quick people have been to intuit this aversion and avoid using the term."
"Notice the difference between the things for which French aristocrats are remembered - the Vicomte de Chateaubriand's cut of fillet, the Marquis de Béchameil's sauce - and the inventions for which Britain remembers its defunct eminences: the cardigan, the wellington, the sandwich."
"I could forgive her many things, but his Welshness is hard to bear."
If you love an unreliable narrator, Tarquin Winot is in the gold medal category. Highly recommended.
4.5 stars.
"I myself have always disliked being called a 'genius'. It is fascinating to notice how quick people have been to intuit this aversion and avoid using the term."
"Notice the difference between the things for which French aristocrats are remembered - the Vicomte de Chateaubriand's cut of fillet, the Marquis de Béchameil's sauce - and the inventions for which Britain remembers its defunct eminences: the cardigan, the wellington, the sandwich."
"I could forgive her many things, but his Welshness is hard to bear."
If you love an unreliable narrator, Tarquin Winot is in the gold medal category. Highly recommended.
4.5 stars.
Read
November 27, 2025The book is narrated by Tarquin Winot as he journeys from the UK to his Provence cottage, tracking two honeymooners as a travelogue based cookery book with musings on seasonal based menus. Written in image filled language with erudite classical references, musings, snobbery and opinionated writing on themes in world cuisine (e.g. fish soups, custards, salads, pies etc.) we also gradually understand Tarquin’s character – part deluded as to his own inadequacies and the reactions of others to him, part a calculating psychopath.
Very unusual and enjoyable book, almost every page has a striking image, opinion or turn of language – although short it is still perhaps around 25% too long as the text starts to repeat, and the true character of the narrator becomes obvious.
Very unusual and enjoyable book, almost every page has a striking image, opinion or turn of language – although short it is still perhaps around 25% too long as the text starts to repeat, and the true character of the narrator becomes obvious.
November 28, 2019
I read this book about 23 years ago. I loved this book as well as every other book of his, with the exception of The Wall (which was still good). This was his first book. Both dustjackets (UK and US) are beautiful! I found this to be an extraordinary novel...extremely clever.
Read
April 30, 2021This is one odd, enjoyable novel! I highly recommend it, if you're the kind of person who likes this sort of thing. And I can't reveal exactly what kind of thing that is—spoilers. Also, lots about the five senses, especially taste and smell.
December 23, 2025
Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester
10 out of 10
Debt to Pleasure is such a fantastic, phenomenal, erudite, amusing, challenging, even frustrating, overwhelming Magnum opus that it floods the reader with contradictory emotions…you feel you are immersed in an extraordinary novel – and it is included for good reason among the 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read – but at the same time, if one is say a vegetarian, never mind a vegan, there are passages that will be more than troubling – say the recipes on bouillabaisse, which could include a…severed horse’s head – because the center of the plot revolves around foods from every corner of the world, Romania is mentioned with tocana and mezeliuri, the latter being misspelled, with recipes, secrets that cover the edible, but also the deadly mushrooms, which appear to have been used in at least a couple of murders.
The Debt to Pleasure is ‘not a conventional cookbook’, a quote with which the book starts and is taken from Bertrand Russell, who had this amusing perspective on Wittgenstein’s ‘philosophical obtuseness’ and there is more from the same…’ My German engineer was very argumentative and tiresome. He wouldn't admit that it was certain that there was not a rhinoceros in the room’…and the jokes are on every page…’What's the difference between 6 and 9 inches, Much Ado about Nothing and A Midsummer Night's Dream’
However, the masterpiece is not a light work, on the contrary and part of the challenge, the frustration one feels is that the ordinary human – at least the one signing this – has no way to grasp all that merveilleux John Lanchester has to say – including his perfect French…he is the one, well the narrator, Tarquin Winot aka Rodney Winot, who insists on this and other skills he has – and it can be a double whammy for someone who had aspired to write and find that this is such an absurd aspiration, given that there are divine creators like John Lanchester…
There are perspectives, insights, analysis offered on an impressive, outlandish number of domains, from omelets and blinis to art and modernism…Only three questions are asked in art…who am I, who are you and what the fuck is going on…Modernism is about finding out how much you could get away with leaving out, while Post modernism is about finding out how much you could get away with putting in’
History has its fascinating, amazing perspectives…’Plantagenets are the favorite of English dynasties for the narrator, because they were less oafish than dreary Anglo-Saxon Warrior chieftains, Less fratricidal than Yorkists and Lancastrians, Less untrustworthy and megalomaniac than the unforgivably Welsh Tudors, Less silly than the Stuarts and finally Less German than everybody else, including the current dynasty…apparently’
Advice on cooking might be predominant in the chef d’oeuvre – yours truly has not done the math, but it looks like it…I was reminded of another remarkable opus, winner of the International Booker Prize, The Vegetarian by Han Kang http://realini.blogspot.com/2021/02/t... and the equally glorious Sapiens by Yuval Hariri http://realini.blogspot.com/2021/02/s... the latter inviting meditation and change on what is a loathsome, horrid massacre of animals, tortured and abused so that human kind can ‘enjoy’ many of the ‘treats’ mentioned in the Debt to Pleasure, which on that take could be read as a ghastly, abhorrent novel that is promoting various ways of killing innocent beings and…humans
Otherwise, the fun of reading this amusing magnum opus is infinite – unless of course we see it diminished by the plea for more sacrifice, which is implied and sine qua non and as explained detracts from the Absolute Bliss to be obtained, because of the cruelty depicted inside, incited, even if the tone is merry and the standards, the perspective have changed – if not enough for the massive, worldwide change that is needed, first for the animals and then for the good of the planet and humanity itself
‘We sat to a meal which Dante would have hesitated to invent, with Mud colored sauce whose texture and temperature were powerfully reminiscent of mucus and Soi-disant cottage pie…while they employed as cooks a Dostoevskyan procession of knaves, dreamers, drunkards, visionaries, bores and frauds – the Norwegian one has died on the railway tracks on what would be declared an accident, in spite of the statement of a witness who had seen Tarquin pushing the poor man in front of the coming train’…these would be just samples of the humor of John Lanchester, who also writes about’ Seafood which is like certain politicians, impressive without inspiring absolute confidence’ in once circumstance
There is humor on every page and critics have been elated and wrote about the character crated by John Lanchester as the ‘greatest since Charles Dickens has put pen to paper, to offer more examples ’Reindeer urine drinking shaman…color Pink is defective, as shown in the taste of God who has created the flamingo…For romans barbarian wearing trousers, having a beard and eating butter’ the latter being associated with French cuisine, which one luminary has apparently declared to be about butter, more butter and again butter’
The author is not just well read, erudite, but an expert on the most diverse domains, his erudition is astonishing and all encompassing, from the time the Inca used, which had the boiling at the potato as measure, to the Irish monoculture of the potato that would lead to the horrible famine that would kill one million, the size of one thing, which is the same as one specific edition of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu – and then considerations of the foolishness of publishing it in four parts versus three – and also the origin, attributes and use in cooking of Eastern plants, among many, the peach aka prunus persica brought by Persians
To conclude, here are some more wondrous fragments…’The artwork exists because of the witness and the quality of the witness is the determining factor in the highest order of art…Cocktail law -main ingredient gin, subordinate ingredient vermouth and grace note lemon twist olive…This is the law of proportion that underlies all of the plastic arts, from Cocktail making and cooking to architecture, sculpture, poetry and dressmaking…The idea of the garden is to create an image of nature to the highest possible level of order while at the same time only permitting the partial awareness of the presence of that… Zen garden gains its effect by the intensity of its absences- less is more…Canned tomatoes –one of the few benefits of modern life, together with dentistry, the compact disc…
10 out of 10
Debt to Pleasure is such a fantastic, phenomenal, erudite, amusing, challenging, even frustrating, overwhelming Magnum opus that it floods the reader with contradictory emotions…you feel you are immersed in an extraordinary novel – and it is included for good reason among the 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read – but at the same time, if one is say a vegetarian, never mind a vegan, there are passages that will be more than troubling – say the recipes on bouillabaisse, which could include a…severed horse’s head – because the center of the plot revolves around foods from every corner of the world, Romania is mentioned with tocana and mezeliuri, the latter being misspelled, with recipes, secrets that cover the edible, but also the deadly mushrooms, which appear to have been used in at least a couple of murders.
The Debt to Pleasure is ‘not a conventional cookbook’, a quote with which the book starts and is taken from Bertrand Russell, who had this amusing perspective on Wittgenstein’s ‘philosophical obtuseness’ and there is more from the same…’ My German engineer was very argumentative and tiresome. He wouldn't admit that it was certain that there was not a rhinoceros in the room’…and the jokes are on every page…’What's the difference between 6 and 9 inches, Much Ado about Nothing and A Midsummer Night's Dream’
However, the masterpiece is not a light work, on the contrary and part of the challenge, the frustration one feels is that the ordinary human – at least the one signing this – has no way to grasp all that merveilleux John Lanchester has to say – including his perfect French…he is the one, well the narrator, Tarquin Winot aka Rodney Winot, who insists on this and other skills he has – and it can be a double whammy for someone who had aspired to write and find that this is such an absurd aspiration, given that there are divine creators like John Lanchester…
There are perspectives, insights, analysis offered on an impressive, outlandish number of domains, from omelets and blinis to art and modernism…Only three questions are asked in art…who am I, who are you and what the fuck is going on…Modernism is about finding out how much you could get away with leaving out, while Post modernism is about finding out how much you could get away with putting in’
History has its fascinating, amazing perspectives…’Plantagenets are the favorite of English dynasties for the narrator, because they were less oafish than dreary Anglo-Saxon Warrior chieftains, Less fratricidal than Yorkists and Lancastrians, Less untrustworthy and megalomaniac than the unforgivably Welsh Tudors, Less silly than the Stuarts and finally Less German than everybody else, including the current dynasty…apparently’
Advice on cooking might be predominant in the chef d’oeuvre – yours truly has not done the math, but it looks like it…I was reminded of another remarkable opus, winner of the International Booker Prize, The Vegetarian by Han Kang http://realini.blogspot.com/2021/02/t... and the equally glorious Sapiens by Yuval Hariri http://realini.blogspot.com/2021/02/s... the latter inviting meditation and change on what is a loathsome, horrid massacre of animals, tortured and abused so that human kind can ‘enjoy’ many of the ‘treats’ mentioned in the Debt to Pleasure, which on that take could be read as a ghastly, abhorrent novel that is promoting various ways of killing innocent beings and…humans
Otherwise, the fun of reading this amusing magnum opus is infinite – unless of course we see it diminished by the plea for more sacrifice, which is implied and sine qua non and as explained detracts from the Absolute Bliss to be obtained, because of the cruelty depicted inside, incited, even if the tone is merry and the standards, the perspective have changed – if not enough for the massive, worldwide change that is needed, first for the animals and then for the good of the planet and humanity itself
‘We sat to a meal which Dante would have hesitated to invent, with Mud colored sauce whose texture and temperature were powerfully reminiscent of mucus and Soi-disant cottage pie…while they employed as cooks a Dostoevskyan procession of knaves, dreamers, drunkards, visionaries, bores and frauds – the Norwegian one has died on the railway tracks on what would be declared an accident, in spite of the statement of a witness who had seen Tarquin pushing the poor man in front of the coming train’…these would be just samples of the humor of John Lanchester, who also writes about’ Seafood which is like certain politicians, impressive without inspiring absolute confidence’ in once circumstance
There is humor on every page and critics have been elated and wrote about the character crated by John Lanchester as the ‘greatest since Charles Dickens has put pen to paper, to offer more examples ’Reindeer urine drinking shaman…color Pink is defective, as shown in the taste of God who has created the flamingo…For romans barbarian wearing trousers, having a beard and eating butter’ the latter being associated with French cuisine, which one luminary has apparently declared to be about butter, more butter and again butter’
The author is not just well read, erudite, but an expert on the most diverse domains, his erudition is astonishing and all encompassing, from the time the Inca used, which had the boiling at the potato as measure, to the Irish monoculture of the potato that would lead to the horrible famine that would kill one million, the size of one thing, which is the same as one specific edition of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu – and then considerations of the foolishness of publishing it in four parts versus three – and also the origin, attributes and use in cooking of Eastern plants, among many, the peach aka prunus persica brought by Persians
To conclude, here are some more wondrous fragments…’The artwork exists because of the witness and the quality of the witness is the determining factor in the highest order of art…Cocktail law -main ingredient gin, subordinate ingredient vermouth and grace note lemon twist olive…This is the law of proportion that underlies all of the plastic arts, from Cocktail making and cooking to architecture, sculpture, poetry and dressmaking…The idea of the garden is to create an image of nature to the highest possible level of order while at the same time only permitting the partial awareness of the presence of that… Zen garden gains its effect by the intensity of its absences- less is more…Canned tomatoes –one of the few benefits of modern life, together with dentistry, the compact disc…
Read
August 13, 2020So so. Too long by about 75 pages. I got tired of the conceit well before the end.
December 2, 2018
'The Debt to Pleasure' is the first novel by John Lanchester, a writer I still mainly associate with his excellent essays on economics for the London Review of Books. This is something entirely different from that, and different too from his recent decent novel Capital which I read a few years ago. This one is framed as a cookbook written by Tarquin Winot, an eccentric dilettante and food fanatic; the chapters are structured around his recipes for short seasonally-themed menus.
What begins as a rambling introduction to food in the style of Elizabeth David soon becomes increasingly digressive. The history and provenance of Wilnot himself intrudes and distracts. The tone becomes Proustian, way beyond the degree of pastiche; it’s carried off very well, though it does feel like riffing rather than earnest imitation. It’s the knowing work of someone who has read widely and is determined to demonstrate this.
‘And now I have to admit to feeling a considerable degree of relief. (There is no more powerful emotion.) These meditations on winter food have been written — and I set down these words with a sense of rabbit-brandishing, curtain-swishing-aside, non-sawn-through-female-assistant-displaying bravura — as the introductory note suggested they would be, in mid-summer, at the start of my ‘hols’. To disclose the truth in full, I have been dictating these reflections on board a ferry during an averagely rough crossing between Portsmouth and St Malo, a journey I must admit to having often found frustratingly intermediate in length…With the aid of a seductively miniaturised Japanese dictaphone I have been murmuring excoriations of English cooking while sitting in the self-service canteen amid microwaved bacon and congealing eggs; I have spoken to myself of our old flat in Bayswater while sitting on the deck and admiring the dowagerly carriage of a passing Panamanian supertanker; I have pushed through the jostling crowd in the video arcade while cudgelling myself to remember whether Mary-Theresa used jam or jelly in her Queen of Puddings, before it struck me (as I tripped over a heedlessly strewn rucksack outside the bureau de change) that she had indeed used jam but insisted on it being sieved — a refinement which, as the reader will not have been slow to notice, I have decided to omit. In all memory there is a degree of fallenness; we are all exiles from our own pasts, just as, on looking up from a book, we discover anew our banishment from the bright worlds of imagination and fantasy. A cross-channel ferry, with its overfilled ashtrays and vomiting children, is as good a place as any to reflect on the angel who stands with a flaming sword in front of the gateway to all our yesterdays.’
The reader has to at least tolerate or at best enjoy this kind of thing (as I do). The sentences ramble on for dozens of lines; the sub-clauses and semi-colons pile up; the verbiage is excessive by nature; the logorrhoea is constant. Nobody could mistake this for a real work of a troubled mind: this is a book which very much follows in the English tradition of the tricksy unreliable narrator. It is deliberately overwrought.
Above all it’s a love letter of sorts to Nabokov, and in particular to 'Pale Fire', perhaps his most peculiar and elusive novel. This much is signalled by the direct, almost confessional nature of the narrator’s voice to the reader, but there’s also a telling direct reference at the end of the introduction. ‘The gulls outside my window are louder than motorcycles,’ Tarquin says abruptly, breaking the spell; Charles Kinbote in 'Pale Fire' ends his intro by declaring: ‘There is a very loud amusement park right in front of my present lodgings.’
Tarquin is up to something in the present day, but it is a long time before we figure out what he’s doing. He rakes over his family situation in some detail: his parents are dead, as is his brother; he’s been nursing a host of grudges, in particular against his only sibling’s success as a modern artist. While writing (or dictating) the book we’re reading, he’s mostly travelling around France. This is a short novel, and a slow one: we get perhaps halfway through before we realise he’s been following a young couple. Naturally his reasons for doing this are not altogether benevolent.
Tarquin would, I think, want his ideal reader to think of his narrative as being essentially timeless – or perhaps I mean ageless. 'The Debt to Pleasure' was published in 1996, and though his story bears many of the outward signs of those tricky early modernist novels, it is in its way redolent of Britain in the nineties. This was a time when British food culture was becoming popularised in a new way. At one end there was high foodism: flash restaurants and haute cuisine that trickled down to TV chef stardom and the emergence of popular, ‘quality’ chain restaurants. All this was part of a hip international Euro-friendly outlook that enabled Tony Blair’s New Labour government to come to power a year later.
The point is that by the late 1990s, British food wasn't just boiled beef and stodge anymore; we were capable of producing anything as good as the French or the Italians. (And we didn't mind begging or borrowing their recipes either.) Lanchester was a part of all this — he wrote on food for The Observer newspaper in the years before this novel — and indeed this is the era in which 'writing on food' becomes something different (though really not so different) from 'reviewing a restaurant'. I think of those fat Saturday and Sunday papers, with their lush full-colour lifestyle supplements dedicated to recipes, restaurants and travel. Travel and food became inseparable in the popular imagination, and it’s easy to imagine a slightly cut-down version of Tarquin propping up a recipe column here and there, or dashing off a book or two (now out of print) before retiring to a quiet oblivion of booze and paid lunches with journalists and politicians.
I thought often of Keith Floyd while reading this. Partly that’s because his television programmes made him seem (like Tarquin) a flamboyant relic of a different time who happened to have made his home in the present day. Floyd was passionate about food, but his television monologues were often less about the coherent presentation of a recipe and more about the conspicuous display of his own expertise, fuelled by a steady stream of alcohol and an attitude of barely-concealed belligerence towards all contrivances necessary for a TV show to be made. (But he knew his stuff. He would have recognised instantly what Tarquin refers to in his obsessive citation of ‘an erotics of dislike’; watching an old episode of Floyd on France recently, I was surprised to find Floyd quoting from Ford Madox Ford's bizarre, digressive book on Provence, which is itself preoccupied with what it means to love and quietly, happily loathe from a distance; and which is also a fairly direct precedent for the style of 'The Debt to Pleasure'.)
If Pale Fire is the book to which this owes the most, by comparison it starts to look a little thin. In Nabokov's novel, the digressions were always in the service of hidden depths – or at least the trompe l'oeil suggestion of them. There are secrets in that novel which I've never quite managed to uncover, even after many rereadings. Here, the narrator's manic circumlocutions are only momentarily diverting. At times they have the feeling of a late-night Wikipedia binge: stimulating on a line-by-line basis, but patterned only according to momentary interest.
There's not much of a bigger picture here, nor is there much in the way of a surprise. One gets the measure of the narrator’s fairly quickly. The story behind it all is thin, and it's easy to guess the direction of travel. But as a feat of deliberate linguistic excess, the book represents a remarkable and sometimes spectacular effort. Many novels do the unreliable narrator thing quite well, but few go quite so far in their dedication to replicating such a superlative style of pointlessly ornate erudition. It is basically a ridiculous confection; but it is also capable of being very funny and very beautiful within the same breath.
What begins as a rambling introduction to food in the style of Elizabeth David soon becomes increasingly digressive. The history and provenance of Wilnot himself intrudes and distracts. The tone becomes Proustian, way beyond the degree of pastiche; it’s carried off very well, though it does feel like riffing rather than earnest imitation. It’s the knowing work of someone who has read widely and is determined to demonstrate this.
‘And now I have to admit to feeling a considerable degree of relief. (There is no more powerful emotion.) These meditations on winter food have been written — and I set down these words with a sense of rabbit-brandishing, curtain-swishing-aside, non-sawn-through-female-assistant-displaying bravura — as the introductory note suggested they would be, in mid-summer, at the start of my ‘hols’. To disclose the truth in full, I have been dictating these reflections on board a ferry during an averagely rough crossing between Portsmouth and St Malo, a journey I must admit to having often found frustratingly intermediate in length…With the aid of a seductively miniaturised Japanese dictaphone I have been murmuring excoriations of English cooking while sitting in the self-service canteen amid microwaved bacon and congealing eggs; I have spoken to myself of our old flat in Bayswater while sitting on the deck and admiring the dowagerly carriage of a passing Panamanian supertanker; I have pushed through the jostling crowd in the video arcade while cudgelling myself to remember whether Mary-Theresa used jam or jelly in her Queen of Puddings, before it struck me (as I tripped over a heedlessly strewn rucksack outside the bureau de change) that she had indeed used jam but insisted on it being sieved — a refinement which, as the reader will not have been slow to notice, I have decided to omit. In all memory there is a degree of fallenness; we are all exiles from our own pasts, just as, on looking up from a book, we discover anew our banishment from the bright worlds of imagination and fantasy. A cross-channel ferry, with its overfilled ashtrays and vomiting children, is as good a place as any to reflect on the angel who stands with a flaming sword in front of the gateway to all our yesterdays.’
The reader has to at least tolerate or at best enjoy this kind of thing (as I do). The sentences ramble on for dozens of lines; the sub-clauses and semi-colons pile up; the verbiage is excessive by nature; the logorrhoea is constant. Nobody could mistake this for a real work of a troubled mind: this is a book which very much follows in the English tradition of the tricksy unreliable narrator. It is deliberately overwrought.
Above all it’s a love letter of sorts to Nabokov, and in particular to 'Pale Fire', perhaps his most peculiar and elusive novel. This much is signalled by the direct, almost confessional nature of the narrator’s voice to the reader, but there’s also a telling direct reference at the end of the introduction. ‘The gulls outside my window are louder than motorcycles,’ Tarquin says abruptly, breaking the spell; Charles Kinbote in 'Pale Fire' ends his intro by declaring: ‘There is a very loud amusement park right in front of my present lodgings.’
Tarquin is up to something in the present day, but it is a long time before we figure out what he’s doing. He rakes over his family situation in some detail: his parents are dead, as is his brother; he’s been nursing a host of grudges, in particular against his only sibling’s success as a modern artist. While writing (or dictating) the book we’re reading, he’s mostly travelling around France. This is a short novel, and a slow one: we get perhaps halfway through before we realise he’s been following a young couple. Naturally his reasons for doing this are not altogether benevolent.
Tarquin would, I think, want his ideal reader to think of his narrative as being essentially timeless – or perhaps I mean ageless. 'The Debt to Pleasure' was published in 1996, and though his story bears many of the outward signs of those tricky early modernist novels, it is in its way redolent of Britain in the nineties. This was a time when British food culture was becoming popularised in a new way. At one end there was high foodism: flash restaurants and haute cuisine that trickled down to TV chef stardom and the emergence of popular, ‘quality’ chain restaurants. All this was part of a hip international Euro-friendly outlook that enabled Tony Blair’s New Labour government to come to power a year later.
The point is that by the late 1990s, British food wasn't just boiled beef and stodge anymore; we were capable of producing anything as good as the French or the Italians. (And we didn't mind begging or borrowing their recipes either.) Lanchester was a part of all this — he wrote on food for The Observer newspaper in the years before this novel — and indeed this is the era in which 'writing on food' becomes something different (though really not so different) from 'reviewing a restaurant'. I think of those fat Saturday and Sunday papers, with their lush full-colour lifestyle supplements dedicated to recipes, restaurants and travel. Travel and food became inseparable in the popular imagination, and it’s easy to imagine a slightly cut-down version of Tarquin propping up a recipe column here and there, or dashing off a book or two (now out of print) before retiring to a quiet oblivion of booze and paid lunches with journalists and politicians.
I thought often of Keith Floyd while reading this. Partly that’s because his television programmes made him seem (like Tarquin) a flamboyant relic of a different time who happened to have made his home in the present day. Floyd was passionate about food, but his television monologues were often less about the coherent presentation of a recipe and more about the conspicuous display of his own expertise, fuelled by a steady stream of alcohol and an attitude of barely-concealed belligerence towards all contrivances necessary for a TV show to be made. (But he knew his stuff. He would have recognised instantly what Tarquin refers to in his obsessive citation of ‘an erotics of dislike’; watching an old episode of Floyd on France recently, I was surprised to find Floyd quoting from Ford Madox Ford's bizarre, digressive book on Provence, which is itself preoccupied with what it means to love and quietly, happily loathe from a distance; and which is also a fairly direct precedent for the style of 'The Debt to Pleasure'.)
If Pale Fire is the book to which this owes the most, by comparison it starts to look a little thin. In Nabokov's novel, the digressions were always in the service of hidden depths – or at least the trompe l'oeil suggestion of them. There are secrets in that novel which I've never quite managed to uncover, even after many rereadings. Here, the narrator's manic circumlocutions are only momentarily diverting. At times they have the feeling of a late-night Wikipedia binge: stimulating on a line-by-line basis, but patterned only according to momentary interest.
There's not much of a bigger picture here, nor is there much in the way of a surprise. One gets the measure of the narrator’s fairly quickly. The story behind it all is thin, and it's easy to guess the direction of travel. But as a feat of deliberate linguistic excess, the book represents a remarkable and sometimes spectacular effort. Many novels do the unreliable narrator thing quite well, but few go quite so far in their dedication to replicating such a superlative style of pointlessly ornate erudition. It is basically a ridiculous confection; but it is also capable of being very funny and very beautiful within the same breath.
May 5, 2014
I'd been looking forward to reading this book as I'd heard such great reviews about it and I love books about food and fiction, so what's not to like I thought in anticipation. I soon found out. I realised the narrator was meant to be pompous and irritating, I tried to make allowances for the fact that he was clearly designed as an unlikable protagonist. I persisted, looking forward to an upswing in my response to the book. But it didn't happen. I'm not sure why. Lanchester is a very good writer, clearly knows his stuff food-wise. There's some seriously good food writing in here, but the trouble is it's interspersed among long and convoluted sentences and over-inflated rhetoric to the point where, rather like reading Henry James, by the time you get to the end of a sentence, you can't remember how it started, where you're meant to be, with who or why.
It's a stream of consciousness monologue that ultimately got too tedious for words. The book's received such a raft of glowing reviews however(including on Goodreads) and what’s more it won the Whitbread prize, that I’ve come to believe I’m no judge of literature whatsoever and should just stick to bodice rippers or something. No, I’d rather read this and suffer.
It's a stream of consciousness monologue that ultimately got too tedious for words. The book's received such a raft of glowing reviews however(including on Goodreads) and what’s more it won the Whitbread prize, that I’ve come to believe I’m no judge of literature whatsoever and should just stick to bodice rippers or something. No, I’d rather read this and suffer.
February 7, 2015
There is next to nothing I can say about this book without dropping spoilers.
It's so dark and disturbing that I would usually say it isn't my kind of story at all. And yet it's so incredibly well done, and so sneaky in how it introduces and builds its full seamy horror, that I can only bow down before John Lanchester in deep admiration. Ten years after reading it, I can recall the mood, the narrative tone, and some images I'll probably never forget.
So perhaps read at your own risk -- but I highly recommend this weird little gem.
January 4, 2024
WARNING!!! Lots of swearie words.
Aaaahhh…. Goan now, ye bollix ye!
Whassat you take me for?
Sure, not all of us here are feckin langers, so we’re not!
So, you really are Jay Rayner? Ach… yer arse is oot the windae sucking oranges. Or are ye just Herr Doktor Richkard Schtein of the Das Reich Panzer Division, East End Monstrous Regiment in your quest for the conquest of Cornubia ( How many feckin restaurants does Herr Schtein have in Padstow and hinterland now?).
You’re a genius old hack of a food writer / restaurant critic with the usual lack of qualifications other than being a smooth-talking Lothario-tongued bummer ( either that or you’re holding the negs to at least one of the Editors pre-pubescent dalliances) and that has got you that cushy golden job of eating for free (well someone’s got to do it, I suppose) and now you fancy yourself a fair scrivener.
Well….. we see through your pantomime dame buffoonery.
What …. You didn’t geddit? You didn’t see the irony, sarcasm and the tongue-in-cheekery?
Oh yes… I think we managed that in spades….. the blatant snobbery….. the similarity to the verbosity of fellow bon viveur and food critic Jonathan Meades’ ‘Pompey’…. The craven drooling pretentiousness of MasterChef before you give us the sleight of hand and the reveal.
Tell me now… where abouts in Islington is it that ye live? Or is it Canonbury? Goan…. Away tae fuck, you one trick pony. You must think I came out of the bog with the gombeen man yesterday.
And I’ve still got two more to read by ye too! Please god may they be more like yer writing for LRB ( and not like this drivel) -some arslikhan Marcus Wareing stylee.
And don’t bother checking any of they fancy words in the Concise Oxford or frantically searching for the recipes or even Wiki-ing the incidental obstruse coloratura. Its all feckin bollix, chickadee,
Hopelessly unfunny. Turgid. A one-line joke that goes on and on (you would say necessarily so) for far too long. Who’d ya think you are. Fuckin’ Proust!
Now fuck off to The Fat Duck. https://thefatduck.co.uk/
Aaaahhh…. Goan now, ye bollix ye!
Whassat you take me for?
Sure, not all of us here are feckin langers, so we’re not!
So, you really are Jay Rayner? Ach… yer arse is oot the windae sucking oranges. Or are ye just Herr Doktor Richkard Schtein of the Das Reich Panzer Division, East End Monstrous Regiment in your quest for the conquest of Cornubia ( How many feckin restaurants does Herr Schtein have in Padstow and hinterland now?).
You’re a genius old hack of a food writer / restaurant critic with the usual lack of qualifications other than being a smooth-talking Lothario-tongued bummer ( either that or you’re holding the negs to at least one of the Editors pre-pubescent dalliances) and that has got you that cushy golden job of eating for free (well someone’s got to do it, I suppose) and now you fancy yourself a fair scrivener.
Well….. we see through your pantomime dame buffoonery.
What …. You didn’t geddit? You didn’t see the irony, sarcasm and the tongue-in-cheekery?
Oh yes… I think we managed that in spades….. the blatant snobbery….. the similarity to the verbosity of fellow bon viveur and food critic Jonathan Meades’ ‘Pompey’…. The craven drooling pretentiousness of MasterChef before you give us the sleight of hand and the reveal.
Tell me now… where abouts in Islington is it that ye live? Or is it Canonbury? Goan…. Away tae fuck, you one trick pony. You must think I came out of the bog with the gombeen man yesterday.
And I’ve still got two more to read by ye too! Please god may they be more like yer writing for LRB ( and not like this drivel) -some arslikhan Marcus Wareing stylee.
And don’t bother checking any of they fancy words in the Concise Oxford or frantically searching for the recipes or even Wiki-ing the incidental obstruse coloratura. Its all feckin bollix, chickadee,
“Perhaps the closest analogy is with the Arts: in the course of a lifetime’s engagement with any one of them one goes through periods of boredom, ennui, anomie, dejà vu, its-all-been-doneness; but then just as exhaustion and fatigue are beginning to set in, just as one grows certain that the full familiarity with all possible excitements has been attained, one comes across a new voice or manner or technique whose effect is as revivifying as the discovery of a despaired-of cache of supplies by an Arctic explorer; thus the intrepid polar explorer is spared from having to settle down and feast on his own huskies. Similarly, the discovery of a new artist is a discovery of new resources: one’s first encounter with Mallarmé or late Beethoven.”Yes Yes. We got it a while ago back on page 3. Such waggish sarcasm. Wonderfully tasteful wit. Erudite, prim ripping-the-pish. Yer man’s not what he seems. Fancy that now, Ted!!! You’re the same exactly, the same kind of schnidey bollix that goes to restaurants and sneers at the less well-off, less knowledgeable, less ‘erudite’ because, in fact, you are the creation you are taking the piss out of.
Hopelessly unfunny. Turgid. A one-line joke that goes on and on (you would say necessarily so) for far too long. Who’d ya think you are. Fuckin’ Proust!
Now fuck off to The Fat Duck. https://thefatduck.co.uk/
June 3, 2024
Kudos to Lanchester for getting away with this tedious hardship, and also congrats to the bloated and gushing reviews plastered on it which were easily the most entertaining part. This is one of the worst novels I’ve ever read – a steaming, pile of utter pretentious shite.
October 25, 2011
The Debt to Pleasure by John Lancaster was an accidental type of book. Something that you just stumble across. It’s not the type of book that you frequently hear being recommended, which is disappointing to me.
I guess I should warn you, the book is about food but it is also about horror. Two subjects I find that are often blended together. This is a revenge tale, but a beautiful one. Like a fancy cake that you are almost afraid to touch so as not to disturb the art and love that went into it.
…thus writes Tarquin Winot, the protagonist and narrator of his life as told through food in John Lanchester’s The Debt to Pleasure. The novel is set up as a series of menus that interweave various autobiographical factoids of Tarquin as he relates his passion for all things food related. As the story progresses the reader gains more and more insight into the life of this self professed epicure. The book starts off rather slow which I found to be a bit frustrating but quickly finds an enjoyable pace. If you enjoy food and literature, this is definitely a book to experience. The pay off at the end is most satisfying. One of the joys of the book is that the various menus that are presented to the reader can be served and enjoyed. Tarquin goes through a step by step process, ingredient by ingredient so that the reader can also create the same meal being presented. A rich history of various foods, particularly french cuisine is weaved into the narrative of his life and obsession with food. If you’re a ‘foodie’, then this book is for you. I learned quite a bit about wine, cheese, mushrooms, and how these items were used historically and the reasons behind why they retain the significance in our dietary lives. A book I found at Brock laying around on a bench the one day. It seemed in need of an owner.
I am often overwhelmed while browsing a bookstore or searching through the pages of amazon as you are confronted with the fact that there are so many millions of books out in the world that will never be read. As an aging bibliophile I am all too aware of the fact that I have a finite amount of time left to read things in life. Every book is a small kind of death, a moment of time that we do not have. These books are tiny mortgages of time and future.
I guess I should warn you, the book is about food but it is also about horror. Two subjects I find that are often blended together. This is a revenge tale, but a beautiful one. Like a fancy cake that you are almost afraid to touch so as not to disturb the art and love that went into it.
To like something is to want to ingest it, and in that sense is to submit to the world. To like something is to succumb, in a small but content-full way, to death. 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
…thus writes Tarquin Winot, the protagonist and narrator of his life as told through food in John Lanchester’s The Debt to Pleasure. The novel is set up as a series of menus that interweave various autobiographical factoids of Tarquin as he relates his passion for all things food related. As the story progresses the reader gains more and more insight into the life of this self professed epicure. The book starts off rather slow which I found to be a bit frustrating but quickly finds an enjoyable pace. If you enjoy food and literature, this is definitely a book to experience. The pay off at the end is most satisfying. One of the joys of the book is that the various menus that are presented to the reader can be served and enjoyed. Tarquin goes through a step by step process, ingredient by ingredient so that the reader can also create the same meal being presented. A rich history of various foods, particularly french cuisine is weaved into the narrative of his life and obsession with food. If you’re a ‘foodie’, then this book is for you. I learned quite a bit about wine, cheese, mushrooms, and how these items were used historically and the reasons behind why they retain the significance in our dietary lives. A book I found at Brock laying around on a bench the one day. It seemed in need of an owner.
I am often overwhelmed while browsing a bookstore or searching through the pages of amazon as you are confronted with the fact that there are so many millions of books out in the world that will never be read. As an aging bibliophile I am all too aware of the fact that I have a finite amount of time left to read things in life. Every book is a small kind of death, a moment of time that we do not have. These books are tiny mortgages of time and future.
July 25, 2020
Just not for me - I got about a third of the way through and gave up. It feels like John Lanchester is using a thesaurus or showing off all the fancy words he knows (I get that it's because the book is written from the perspective of the central character who would write like that, but it takes a lot of effort to get through) and it's not a particularly gripping plot. Life's too short to finish books that you're not enjoying.
January 26, 2009
pretentious, rambling, elaborate so says one reviewer. I prefer the other reviewer who says: dark and sensuous and beautiful and sinister. It's about food and stuff.
Read
May 25, 2025Tedious.
Read
December 19, 2017Delicious, Scrumptious, Savoury, Luscious, Entertaining, Delightful, Effervescent, Droll, Diverting, Appetizing
This book is all of these and many others, and it is so relentlessly. I am not the intended reader: it's impossible not to be amused and instructed, but for me it's also impossible to be happy when an author is so tirelessly trying to be of impeccable seamless delicately balanced good cheer.
I imagine if I was prone to sudden dizzying dips in general happiness, I would find this a balm, but I would only feel good while I was reading. The moment I stopped I'd be unhappy again. Just as it is with any diversion. A novel, I think, needs to want to do more: at the very least its author has to want, every once in a while, for more than just a sentence at a time, to make her reader unhappy.
This isn't sour grapes (to use a Lanchester-style metaphor) as far as I can see, because I'm not against entertainment. But in order for something to entertain me, it has to be either very brief -- I can read one of his chapters at a time -- or, more interestingly, it has sometimes to turn its back on me. Otherwise I'm like a child overstuffed with sweets.
This book is all of these and many others, and it is so relentlessly. I am not the intended reader: it's impossible not to be amused and instructed, but for me it's also impossible to be happy when an author is so tirelessly trying to be of impeccable seamless delicately balanced good cheer.
I imagine if I was prone to sudden dizzying dips in general happiness, I would find this a balm, but I would only feel good while I was reading. The moment I stopped I'd be unhappy again. Just as it is with any diversion. A novel, I think, needs to want to do more: at the very least its author has to want, every once in a while, for more than just a sentence at a time, to make her reader unhappy.
This isn't sour grapes (to use a Lanchester-style metaphor) as far as I can see, because I'm not against entertainment. But in order for something to entertain me, it has to be either very brief -- I can read one of his chapters at a time -- or, more interestingly, it has sometimes to turn its back on me. Otherwise I'm like a child overstuffed with sweets.
September 9, 2017
"You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style," says Humbert Humbert, and there are a number of similarities between him and the hero of this novel, a snobby aesthete, astoundingly knowledgeable, and completely mad. The conceit could have been anyone's, and the story, told in gaps between discussions on food, history, and aesthetics, pretty unimportant. What's great is the execution. Lanchester's impressive depth of food knowledge and general scholarship (I had to keep interrupting to Google: Cavalcanti, The Praise of Folly, Lichtenberg, etc.). I found it fun and edifying in equal measure. A fairly representative prose sample:
We then sat down to a meal which Dante would have hesitated to invent. I was seated opposite my parents, between a spherical house matron and a silent French assistant. The first course was a soup in which pieces of undisguised and unabashed gristle floated in a mud-coloured sauce whose texture and temperature were powerfully reminiscent of mucus. Then a steaming vat was placed in the middle of the table, where the jowly, watch-chained headmaster presided. He plunged his serving arm into the vessel and emerged with a ladleful of hot food, steaming like fresh horse dung on a cold morning. For a heady moment I thought I was going to be sick. A plate of soi-disant cottage pie – the mince grey, the potato beige – was set in front of me.
‘The boys call this “mystery meat”,’ confided matron happily. I felt the assistant flinch. Other than that I don’t remember (I can’t imagine) what we talked about, and over the rest of the meal – as Swinburne’s biographer remarked, à propos an occasion when his subject had misbehaved during a lecture on the subject of Roman sewage systems – ‘the Muse of history must draw her veil’.
May 25, 2014
The design of the 1996 hardcover with jacket Canadian edition from McClelland & Stewart is the reason that I picked this book up from amongst the volumes on a big bookstore sales table some years ago. Kudos to the book designer and to the jacket designer, both.
I had this novel on my shelf then for several years, but once I finally took a few bites, I ate it up! The writing, the narrator, the design: it's the best kind of a "full meal deal."
One might think the narrator a pompous, boorish ass -- if one could not but help find him so horribly entertaining! Tarquin Winot is annoying, condescending, smart alecky, calculating, egocentric, jealous, self-obsessed, superior, patronizing, snotty, narcissistic, devious and self-important. He is a sociopath and he is very good at it. He is also quite a good storyteller in his own sly way.
Lanchester hits the epicurean snob tone and rhythm just right, and drops the bits of his narrator's biography amongst his oh-so-cultured foodie-ism in a manner that is at least as tantalizing as the recipes, meals and menus described. And Tarquin's thoughts on the arts are in fact quite interesting.
If you liked this novel, I suggest you also read The Other Typist (for an unfolding mystery and interesting narrator) or Like Water for Chocolate (for the love of food and foodways).
I had this novel on my shelf then for several years, but once I finally took a few bites, I ate it up! The writing, the narrator, the design: it's the best kind of a "full meal deal."
One might think the narrator a pompous, boorish ass -- if one could not but help find him so horribly entertaining! Tarquin Winot is annoying, condescending, smart alecky, calculating, egocentric, jealous, self-obsessed, superior, patronizing, snotty, narcissistic, devious and self-important. He is a sociopath and he is very good at it. He is also quite a good storyteller in his own sly way.
Lanchester hits the epicurean snob tone and rhythm just right, and drops the bits of his narrator's biography amongst his oh-so-cultured foodie-ism in a manner that is at least as tantalizing as the recipes, meals and menus described. And Tarquin's thoughts on the arts are in fact quite interesting.
If you liked this novel, I suggest you also read The Other Typist (for an unfolding mystery and interesting narrator) or Like Water for Chocolate (for the love of food and foodways).
January 24, 2013
This novel really has an odd arc to it. It starts out as an almost plotless meditation on fancy food and cooking. Then it gradually, very gradually, becomes the story of a scary, diabolical sociopath. As someone recently more and more interested in fine cuisine and the culinary arts, it was challenging but not overly so to make it through the first 170 pages or so of the gourmet musings of the narrator. And then it starts getting really juicy, though still full of ever so erudite foodstuff trivia.
September 6, 2011
Loved this book! Which is hilarious and surprising and full of the longest sentences you've read since grad school. The attitudinal narrator loves digression and starts many an assertion that is interrupted with clause after modifying clause, going on and on until when the object of the sentence finally arrives - as often as not I had to go back to see where it had begun, because by then I'd forgotten. If you find that sort of thing annoying, you'll probably hate this book. I liked it. And he's full of arcane information and definite opinions about food - presenting the story as a kind of cookbook. Which at first it is, interwoven with memories, experiences, family stories, etc . . . until somewhere along the line enough hints have been dropped that a reader begins to wonder: is he maybe a detective? Or . . . some kind of criminal? A murderer maybe? Which fits beautifully with the evasive, orthogonal prose style and the aforementioned attitude. An excellent, highly entertaining read.
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