Rating: 
Summary: An evil little book!
Review: Reading this one is a bit like having too many glasses of a fabulous sauterne: wonderful, flavorful intoxication that leaves you feeling a little off your feed in succeeding hours.Look, this one is worth it, if only for the French art tourism advice and the culinary hints. The main character's goals and motivation are so much less sophisticated and insightful than his tastes that I docked the book a star, but you might not agree. And you may never feel safe gathering wild mushrooms again!
Rating:
Summary: Cuisine inside out
Review: I did not know a thing about this book or its author, but its cover has been attracting me for a long time, and finally I gave in. The cover was very, very good - a detail of a still life from Prado, six apples hung on strings, against pitch-black background. The author is a deputy editor of a prestigious London literary magazine and an ex-restaurant critic of a major newspaper. Which led me to believe, naively, that it would be a fancy cookbook. But soon enough it turned out that the narrator, Tarquin Winot, can scarcely be the author's alter ego - for reasons I will not divulge, because it would mean to give out the points of the plot. The transition from a gastronomic treatise into a topsy-turvy crime story is seamless and elegant. A brilliant book. I was just surprised that the critics (judging by their comments on the cover) were uniformly amazed at the author's erudition. In my opinion, Lanchester supplied his narrator with just the usual scraps of middle-class general knowledge (apart from cuisine staff), and did it quite deliberately. Some critics.
Rating:
Summary: Would Tarquin Winot Like Hannibal Lector?
Review: I was able to read this little book for my book club. Not being of the literary ilk, at first I found it rather hard to read. As I settled into it though, I found that I thoroughly enjoyed this wicked little tome about a murderous gourmet. It was delicious, adroit, delectable, and pretentious, but it certainly was not banal nor mundane. Well, one of the reasons I really liked this book was its big words, and I was able to use my little grey cells. Read it if you want a tasty experience!
Rating:
Summary: The Monster Within
Review: One's reaction to this book will, in large part, be predicated on how one reacts to cleverness and dark humor. For, while written with indisputable skill, Lanchester's novel is more than anything an exercise in droll, urbane, (dare I say smug) cleverness-at it's best (or worst, according to one's taste). Within the deliciously witty, snide, nasty, condescending, and rambling meditations of one Tarquin Winot lie dark kernels of truth regarding his true nature and past. Tarquin is both genius and gourmand, so his writings are loosely arranged around a seasonal menu, with tangential discourses on the various ingredients and much more. While his descriptions of food are certainly evocative, there's much more going on than a simple foodie travelogue. It's obvious quite early on that he's a pampered egomaniac, and indeed, after a while, his self-absorbed ramblings begin to grow wearisome. However, mingled with these are broad clues as to true megalomania and psychopathy. All of this emerges as he recounts an interview he grants his brother's biographer. That some reviewers found the book disturbing or unsettling seems rather odd. Well-cultured and well-spoken psychopaths are hardly a new phenomenon in either literature or real life, and that's essentially what Tarquin is. It's possible that this disquiet comes from the reader becoming enamored of Tarquin and then finding out his true nature at the very end, but this seems exceedingly unlikely. For all Lanchester's skill, Tarquin's "secret" is fairly evident quite early on, via a number of extremely broad hints, so that readers who are paying any kind of attention will quickly realize that all is not as it might seem. In the end, it's a fairly clever and certainly well-written character study, with a dark secret that is unearthed rather too soon for the book to be entirely satisfactory. Still, it is clear Lanchester is a writer worth watching.
Rating: 
Summary: Hannibal Lecter writes a cook book
Review: This book both enthralled me, and gave me the chills. It was much like reading "The Silence of the Lambs" from the point of view of Hannibal. You know, "I HAD to kill the census worker, his liver just went SO WELL with fava beans and chianti." Reading the other customer reviews, I both loved and hated the book. I could agree with points on both sides. I'm not sure whether this means that it is a truly gifted book, or that I'm really twisted.... I'm sure that I would have liked it much more if I had had a knowledge of French or French cuisine. Some of the names of dishes he mentioned in passing would probably have added to the wit of the book if I had known what they were. I can understand what a pate is, but some of the more convoluted dish names had me saying "What the heck is that?" Well worth the time and effort to read if you can get through the dense and convoluted prose.
Rating: 
Summary: A psycho killer by any other name . . .
Review: Yes, the narrator is brilliant. And he is very witty. But his "secret" comes clanking out far, far before it is meant to be discovered. And the basic premise of the book, that a psychopath can be cultured and discriminating, is not a novel idea, nor idea enough for a novel. Tiring, cold as ice, and predictable. Listen to "Murder by Numbers" by the Police for the same story, but with a better beat and less of your time. All those falsely flattered into admiring the book will certainly boo me from the floor . . .
Rating: 
Summary: stylish debut
Review: This debut novel by the British book reviewer and food critic, John Lanchester, owes a roughly equal debt to Jean-Anthelme Brillat Savarin's The Physiology of Taste, perhaps the most revered book on cooking ever written, and to Vladimir Nabokov's classics Lolita and Pale Fire, with a dash of Remains of the Day thrown in. The book starts out as mere "culinary reflections" by a brilliant, arrogant, pedantic, almost grotesquely loquacious Englishman named Tarquin Winot : Over the years, many people have pleaded with me to commit to paper my thoughts on the subject of food. Indeed the words 'Why don't you write a book about it?,' uttered in an admittedly wide variety of tones and inflections, have come to possess something of the quality of a mantra--one tending to be provoked by a disquisition of mine on, for instance, the composition of an authoritative cassoulet, or Victorian techniques for baking hedgehogs in clay. These reflections, structured around specific menus, and presented over the course of a travelogue, are fascinating, as they veer off onto obscure tangents, and slyly funny, as Winot completely dominates the book with his distinctive voice and maddeningly egotistical monologues. But the reader quickly comes to distrust him and eventually to suspect his motives. He is after all traveling in disguise, seems to be following a young couple, and reveals the unfortunate ends met by his brother, a famous artist, and several others over the course of his life. These facts, combined with the elitist morality he espouses, raise some uncomfortable questions about what exactly Mr. Winot is up to here. Unlike Pale Fire or Dom Casmurro by Machado de Assis, in the end there's not much doubt left about the central events of the novel. Mr. Lanchester is less interested in preserving the mystery than in the hugely entertaining character he's created. Tarquin Winot, even if he is a sociopath, is a very amusing one. And Mr Lanchester has rare common sense enough to keep the book brief, ending the "gastro-historico-psycho-autobiographico-anthropico-philosophic lucubrations" before Winot's act grows tiresome. If you always knew the Frugal Gourmet had something to hide. If Martha Stewart's icy WASP demeanor has always seemed like a front to you. Read The Debt to Pleasure and in its deliciously insidious pages have your worst fears confirmed, about the hideous evil that lurks behind these facades of condescending homemaking competence. GRADE : A-
Rating:
Summary: very well-written narcissistic tedium
Review: Tarquin Winot fancies himself a connoisseur, an arbiter of taste, a genius, and possibly, God. Unfortunately, this doesn't make him a very interesting narrator, since egomania becomes tiresome pretty quickly. His only redeeming trait, a nasty, stinging wit, surfaces too infrequently to save him from being a well-fed bore. This is not a book about sensory pleasures, food or otherwise. This is a book in which the protagonist's pervasive narcissism prevents him from perceiving anything in his life--food, landscapes, people, you name it--in any capacity other than props for his overblown self-involvement. Tarquin Winot's world really only contains Tarquin Winot: Tarquin Winot's food, Tarquin Winot's house, Tarquin Winot's family. So it comes as no surprise when finally, breathlessly, he admits to dispatching his shadowy, barely animate acquaintances. ("Yeah, yeah, so you pushed your nanny in front of a train. Zzzzzz.") However, I'm biased. I have an institutionalized narcissistic relative who phones only to recite her myriad superlative qualities--she's the BEST mother, the SMARTEST Mensa member, the MOST GIFTED writer/artist/dancer,and of course, the BEST mental patient ever. Consequently, I would've preferred reading about a protagonist with a less monotonous psychological handicap. --But that's just me.
Rating:
Summary: a master chef's secrets
Review: 'The Debt to Pleasure' is a case of "what you see ain't necessary what you get". It starts off with a pompous master chef from England telling us about how to prepare fine French delicacies while he is enroute to France from England. However one soon realises that it's not the recipes which are of main importance but rather the cunning little detours he takes when he slips in a few words about his life. We soon realise this bore has a hidden mean streak. The book matures into a dark comedy - I thoroughly enjoyed it. Bottom line: a fast, enjoyable read for all - especially those fans of French cuisine. I also recommend John Lanchester's second novel, 'Mr Phillips'.
Rating:
Summary: MFK Fisher Meets Damian
Review: You will feel more clever for having read this book. You will also learn more than you wanted to know about preparing food and the dangers of improper handling. It is a bit fanciful and highly stylized but nonetheless it is smart, funny, and more than a little poignant. Reading through Tarquin's perspective, it is somewhat difficult to debate his final, monstrous postulate. He is an artist in a medium we'd rather not explore. Read the book. It's short. It's funny. It's got a pretty painting on the cover and it will haunt you in delicate ways.
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