The Debt to Pleasure (Fyfield Books)

The Debt to Pleasure

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Tony rated it really liked it Dec 15, Phillip Zalick rated it it was amazing Nov 19, Asimina rated it liked it Nov 27, Katherine Precht rated it it was amazing May 27, Molly Moore rated it it was amazing Jun 02, Leland LeCuyer rated it really liked it Jul 07, Heather Holscher rated it it was amazing Dec 29, Mariam rated it it was amazing Jun 29, John rated it it was amazing Dec 24, Laura rated it liked it Nov 02, Alessandra marked it as to-read Sep 24, Leah Hepner added it Jul 09, Kali added it Sep 28, Elaine marked it as to-read Aug 23, Olivia marked it as to-read Dec 08, Chris added it Dec 15, Raul Olvera marked it as to-read Jun 10, Pilman added it Aug 23, Cera marked it as to-read Nov 05, Ruth marked it as to-read May 27, Shadre marked it as to-read Aug 10, Heather added it Nov 06, Antigone added it Nov 26, Andrew Schirmer marked it as to-read Nov 30, Description Excerpt Author Contents Reviews Some few, from wit, have this true maxim got, That 'tis still better to be pleased than not , And therefore never their own torment plot; While the malicious critics still agree To loathe each play they come, and pay, to see.

The first know 'tis a meaner part of sense To find fault than taste an excellence; Therefore they praise and strive to like, while these Are dully vain of being hard to please. Poets and women have an equal right To hate the dull, who, dead to all delight, Feel pain alone, and have no joy but spite. Fools censure wit as old men rail of sin, Who envy pleasure which they cannot taste And, good for nothing, would be wise at last Since therefore to the women it appears That all these enemies of wit are theirs, Our poet the dull herd no longer fears.

Whate'er his fate shall prove, 'twill be his pride To stand or fall with beauty on his side. Rochester , incontestably the greatest of the Restoration poets and reprobates, is presented in The Debt to Pleasure both in his own words and the words of those who loved or loathed him. 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. I loved it, and loved this book too, so let "Elegance" be a guideline to you!

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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. 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 hig There is next to nothing I can say about this book without dropping spoilers. So perhaps read at your own risk -- but I highly recommend this weird little gem.

View all 10 comments. Oct 25, sonicbooming rated it it was amazing. The Debt to Pleasure by John Lancaster was an accidental type of book. Something that you just stumble across. 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.

The Debt To Pleasure

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.

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. 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.

John Banville on John Lanchester’s The Debt to Pleasure – ‘Richly, unflaggingly, gruesomely funny’

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. Dec 29, Stephen Redwood rated it liked it Shelves: 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 a I found the extreme erudition irritating and making progress felt like running through mud, until my denseness caught up with the irony. 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.

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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. Dec 18, Jim Elkins added it Shelves: I am not the intended reader: I imagine if I was prone to sudden dizzying dips in general happiness, I would find this a balm, Delicious, Scrumptious, Savoury, Luscious, Entertaining, Delightful, Effervescent, Droll, Diverting, Appetizing This book is all of these and many others, and it is so relentlessly.

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: 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. 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: 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. Jan 07, Steev Hise rated it really liked it Recommended to Steev by: 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 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 trivi This novel really has an odd arc to it.

And then it starts getting really juicy, though still full of ever so erudite foodstuff trivia. It's really pretty ingenious how the author ever so gently introduces the narrator's simmering jealousy toward his brother, a famous artist, and also at the same time increasingly reveals with greater and greater obviousness that the narrator has murdered, as a child, his nanny and his family's cook, and then later his parents and his brother.

This is an excellent example of an "unreliable narrator," someone you at first identify with as a brilliant and artful and sensitive aesthete, and then a tiny bit at a time you realize, hmm, this guy is a monster. Aug 16, Diane rated it it was amazing. 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. And he's Loved this book! 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.

Which fits beautifully with the evasive, orthogonal prose style and the aforementioned attitude.

An excellent, highly entertaining read. Imagine Jean-Anthelme Brillat Savarin author of The Physiology of Taste crossed with Nabokov's Charles Kinbote and you may come up with someone like Tarquin Winot, Francophile food editor and fabulously insane narrator of this deliciously evil little gem. I envy the aficionado of comic fiction who hasn't yet experienced its pleasures. Jan 26, Alan rated it it was amazing Shelves: I prefer the other reviewer who says: It's about food and stuff.

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 '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. 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. There is no more powerful emotion. 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 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: It is deliberately overwrought. He rakes over his family situation in some detail: This is a short novel, and a slow one: 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.

This was a time when British food culture was becoming popularised in a new way. At one end there was high foodism: The point is that by the late s, 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. I thought often of Keith Floyd while reading this.

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. If Pale Fire is the book to which this owes the most, by comparison it starts to look a little thin.

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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: There's not much of a bigger picture here, nor is there much in the way of a surprise. 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. Sep 19, Philip rated it it was amazing.

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