Rating: 
Summary: Nearly Nabokov
Review: If you like dark comedies and find culinary arts even the least bit interesting, read this marvelous first novel from John Lanchester.I truly wish I could tell you that John Lanchester's _The Debt to Pleasure_ is a 5 star wonder, but I just can't. Lanchester's protagonist and narrator, Tarquin Winot, certainly pans the breadth of the author's vocabulary, erudition, and culinary knowledge, and _Debt_ is a spectacular premier effort. Reading through the first few chapters, I noticed a certain similarity to Nabokov's _Pale Fire_. Unfortunately, the novel ultimately fails to deliver on this early promise. Like _Pale Fire_, the story that the narrator tells and the story the he intends to tell are clearly at odds with one another, and though Lanchester manages to juggle this dichotomy successfully throughout much of the novel, he lets the shoe fall a bit early. Well before the end, the trail is too clearly marked out for us. The trip is pleasant, but the plot is already resolved except for the details of how who did what to whom. Quite unlike Nabokov's masterwork of insinuative commentary, Tarquin ends the novel by tying up the entire plot in a package that is at once too neat and too heavy. Overall, Lanchester succeeds when Tarquin is strong and fails when Tarquin is foolish. To be more precise, Lanchester fails when he loses control of Tarquin's secrecy and subtlety (as when he describes his clownish attire or when he rationalizes his actions in his explication to the biographer near the end of the novel) and succeeds when Tarquin is most thoroughly and ludicrously in control (when he elucidates his belief that only lesser artists actually create anything or when he passes culinary judgment upon damn near anything at all). When a chuckling Tarquin says to the biographer, "Anyone would think you were writing my brother's biography," I want him to know (as we know) the true subject of the biography. That would help to explain the cross country search and the final act of the novel, but Tarquin/Lanchester does not make this clear, leaving Tarquin looking perhaps just a little bit more foolish and quirky, just a little bit less frightening. Yes, the novel is funny. Yes, it is a marvelous read. Yes, I await Lanchester's next work. But, no, it's not quite a masterpiece.
Rating: 
Summary: The best of the food-literature genre
Review: Sarcasm and snobbery are not the first things that leap into mind when reading a cookbook, but then this is not, as Lanchester's book says, "an ordinary cookbook". It's principal character with the unlikely name of Tarquin Winot displays all at once his genius, his command of history, literature, science and cooking as well as his humorous and utter contempt for others in this outstanding voyage across Europe and into the depths of evil.It starts fairly tamely, a la "Like Water For Chocolate," telling a recipe the long way through paragraphs of storytelling. But it more than tells a story; it dives into longwinded, sort-of correct and hilarious discourses into every possible subject that would make Benjamin Franklin proud. The sort-of-correctness of each anecdote becomes more and more suspect as Winot hints increasingly at a far more sinister side. His character facade changes as often as his disguises even as each recipe is more delicious and more detailed than the last. While the crowding genre of food-mystery/food-love/food-anything books continues to swell, the Debt to Pleasure stand out for the depth of Winot character, his brilliance, his evil, and ultimately, his fragility.
Rating:
Summary: Darkly delicious!
Review: What do you get when you mix dark language, delicious food and smoldering erotica in one single novel? You get The Debt to Pleasure. This is one of the most delectable novels I've ever read. John Lanchester mixes a dark and sinister plot with beautiful and mouth-watering descriptions of exotic foods and disarming erotica. Tarquin Winot is one of the most sinister characters ever written. His exploits enthralled me. I couldn't put this book down. This cookbook-cum-erotica is brilliant from beginning to end. By far, one of the best books I've read this year. Highly recommended...
Rating:
Summary: "What? A cookbook?"
Review: I said to a friend of mine who wanted me to read this book, but was unwilling to reveal its true nature. While the thought of reading a cookbook did not appeal to me, he insisted and I'm glad he did-- certainly this is one of the best modern novels I have read. The plot flies shockingly out of nowhere, and Tarquin Winot is one of the most purely evil characters I have ever enountered in a work of literature. Outside the plot structure, Winot's clever observations on everything he mentions provide sufficient entertainment in themselves. The Debt to Pleasure is an impressively constructed novel.
Rating:
Summary: The Debt to Pleasure is a pleasure itself
Review: I love reading about food - whether it be a description in a novel or a book specifically written about food. This is somewhere in the middle - a novel which is a parody of the foodie memoir. The narrator Tarquin is a self-important snob, travelling from the UK to his home in Provence. He shares his thoughts on food and recipes, and also fills in the reader about his past. We learn that not only is he deluded about his own ability and living under the shadow of his world-renowned artist brother; but slowly we discover he is a very devious character as well. This is a well written, funny story, and has the requisite yummy food writing (highly inspiring!) but it loses a star because of Tarquin's long winded philosophical discourses. I know it's a parody but....
Rating:
Summary: A good read. This choice quote is from the preface:
Review: In one of my very favorite prefaces, the protagonist (author) says that he is writing the preface before he writes the text, rather than writing the preface last as is commonly done: ". . .we are all familar with the after-the-fact tone--weary, self-justificatory, agrieved, apologetic--shared by ship captains appearing before boards of inquiry to explain how they come to run their vessels aground, and by authors composing forewards." It is "a collection of memories, dreams, reflections, the whole simmering together, synergistically exchanging savors and essences like some ideal daube. This will, I hope, give the book a serendipitous, ambulatory, and yet progressive structure." "Finally, I have decided that, wherever possible, the primary vehicle for the transmission of my culinary reflections will be the menu. These menus shall be arranged seasonally. It seems to me that the menu lies close to the heart of the human impulse to order, to beauty, to pattern. It draws on the original chthonic upwelling that underlies all art." "A menu can embody the anthropology of a culture or the psychology of an individual; it can be a biography, a cultural history, a lexicon. . ." "It can be a way of knowledge, a path, an inspiration, a Tao, an ordering, a memory, a fantasy, a seduction, a prayer, a summoning, an incantation murmured under the breath as the torchlights sink lower and the forest looms taller and the wolves howl louder and the fire prepares for its submission to the encroaching dark." "I'm not sure that this would be my choice for a honeymoon hotel. The gulls outside my window are louder than motorcycles."
Rating:
Summary: Can fiction prose get as tactile and ebullient as this?
Review: Do you know that word "barbecue" originates from Haitian "barbacado" that refers to a rack-frame system leaving off the ground a bed? Do you know that tomatoes, if imminently picked and allowed to ripe during transport, will turn plasticky and insipid? Do you know that the thickness requirement in preserving the juice in barbecued meat is an inch to 3 inches? Have you ever wondered why starch (such as rice) and fruits, and not a glass of iced water, serve to subdue the spiciness of curry? John Lanchester's The Debt of Pleasure not only deftly answers all the above questions but also, in impeccable and painfully beguiling prose, embraces his readers into the world of Tarquin Winot. Strictly speaking, the book, which is nothing more than a scrumptious culinary reflection in thoughtful menus arranged by the seasons, cannot be deemed as a work of fiction if Winot is a real chef. From his menus, which embody different cultures, capture a man's psychology and thus his impulse to order, and witness the come-and-go of dining trends; Winot related the story of his life to the preparations of food. The writing is as insatiating and titillating as the menus. Winot retreated to southern France and reminisced, papered his thoughts on the subject of food that evoked his childhood, his parents, his brother Barthomelow the artist, the beloved maidservant Mary-Theresa, and the home cook Mitthaug. Aroma of a particular dish could graciously tug his memory and coalesce the disparate locations of Winot's upbringing. Woven into his painfully and haughtily opinionated meditations on food was disheartening anecdotes of his family. His brother struggled as an artist who, like other artists in history, never felt adequately attended to for his work and died a tragic death of fungus poisoning. His parents, in a multiplying series of mishaps that primarily involved leaving all the kitchen gas taps on and a full-scale leak from the gas boiler, died in an explosion triggered by turning on a light switch. The lighter side of the book tells of Winot's aspiration to becoming a chef. He attributed such biographical significance to a chance visit to his brother's boarding school in England. The food served was a nightmarish demonstration of culinary banality and a stark confirmation of Captain Ford's quote in 1846 "The salad is the glory of every French dinner and the disgrace of most in England." A more humorous side would be Winot's rash denunciation of sweet-and-sour dishes (lupsup, meaning garbage) that dominated the English dining. As a native of Hong Kong, the notion truly hit home as any violent combination such as the sweet-and-sour taste is immediately deemed as inauthentic. Read it as a novel "masquerading" as a cookbook, as a memoir, as food critics, as secretive cooking knacks, as word of caution (such as the roasting of apple seeds will release toxins), as an indispensable companion to your conventional cookbook, an eccentric philosophical soliloquy of the culinary art. I vouch that anyone who reads this book will find the recipes zestfully flirting with the tastebuds and liberating the senses. Exquisitely written. 4.2 stars.
Rating:
Summary: Highly recommended
Review: I truly enjoyed this dark and odd novel. The ideal reader has an interest in cooking, Europe, camp humor, satire and a large vocabulary. Like on the previous reviewers, I found it to be a close (if very strange) cousin of Nabokov's Pale Fire.
Rating:
Summary: If only all cookbooks were this fun to read!
Review: I enjoyed this book more as I got further into it, for obvious reasons. As a lay person reading this book that was given to me by a friend, I found it at first very hard to get into. But as I learned more about Tarquin, the more I became fascinated with his psychological dichotemy. Looking back at the beginning of the book after finishing it, I could see the progression of the character in a more revealing light. Definitely worth the first (and second) read. I only docked it a start because, as I mentioned before, I think the casual reader may be turned off in the beginning of the book and miss out on this wonderful narrative by not pressing onward.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful
Review: This book is beautifully dark and endlessly funny and extremely smart in that English way. I've given it to half a dozen people, and most love it (some are indifferent).
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