In an essay in this week's NYT Book Review, Geoff Nicholson explains why he doesn't like novels that "describ[e] meals in sumptuous, elaborate detail":[S]ince I’m likely to be reading [a book] while sitting alone on the couch sustained only by instant coffee, I tend to develop a bad case of food envy. It’s a lot like sex, I think. I don’t want characters in novels to eat better than I do, any more than I want them to have better sex lives than I do.
Instead, Nicholson prefers disgusting descriptions of food like this one found in William Burroughs's Naked Lunch:
In Egypt is a worm gets into your kidneys and grows to an enormous size. Ultimately the kidney is just a thin shell around the worm. Intrepid gourmets esteem the flesh of The Worm above all other delicacies. It is said to be unspeakably toothsome.
3 comments:
I'll pass on the kidney worm but the photo accompanying this post makes me hungry. Is that a miniature piece of cheese toast in the foreground? MMMM.....
I tend to disagree with Nicholson on this point. I really like to read luscious descriptions of food in my literature. Sometimes I even think it elevates my opinion of an otherwise average book.
I think it is cheese toast!
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