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Winot is so waspishly nasty, so full of condescension, and so unsympathetic a character that I almost gave up on him and the book, thinking both too rarefied to be interesting. Then the author "hooked" me with a few details that made me think that Winot might not be all he seemed to be--that he might be far more fascinating than I had previously suspected. As Winot takes the reader through a series of elaborate seasonal menus, he casually drops hints about his past, piquing the reader's interest and inspiring him/her to figure out exactly what kind of man Winot is and what, exactly, he has done. This strange, unwinding backstory becomes the compelling "plot."
Carefully crafted and (ultimately) coherent, this novel of intrigue is a delight to read, filled with sumptuous imagery, wickedly dark humor, and a series of mysteries that depend on the reader's ability to read between the lines and draw conclusions. Both cerebral and sensual, this is a literary entree one cannot help but savor. Mary Whipple
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.
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