So here we are indebted to pleasure

The Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester

In a nutshell : Tarquin Winot is our epicurian, gentleman dandy narrator who, via seasonal menus, gives us a scattered autobiography, food memoirs and a million throaway opinions and comments on life, art, l'art de vivre etc etc etc.

The blurb : quite dense to read- do not be fooled by the fact it is only a couple of hundred pages long. Tarquin is an incredible narrator, erudite and with a poor opinion of his surroundings (exept good food, southern france, good art and the occasional beautiul woman) and launches in to a monologue on all of this. It does however become increasingly clear that he is completely mad, as he carefully builds up confessions to - haha!- and generally makes clear that he is a megalomaniac, schizo genius. He is oblivious to his own faults and the opinions some may have of him, making him a rather credible character, and it is great (on rereading the book, which is a must) to understand the gap between his opinion of himself and what he actually is.

IMHO this is a brilliant book which needs to be read and reread. Tons of facts on pretty much everything - though mainly food (of course), art, history and travel. In every paragraph he wanders off down another thought path. Taken all together it is a very funny and witty, amazingly constructed, book, that draws you in to the strange mind of the Tarquin Winot and slowly sheds light on what he is really getting up to... Highly recommended.

So here we are drinking with Wilberforce

The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce by Paul Torday

In a nutshell: a backwards book that starts with the end, whose main character Wilberforce is a wine-lover (according to him), a hopeless alcoholic. The question is how, and why, did he become so?

The blurb: the book's opening scene introduces us to Wilberforce stepping out of a taxi and about to spend thousands of pounds on Chatau Petrus 1982 in a fashionable restaurant. Soon we understand that he is a wine-lover, and then rapidly realise it's a bit more than that. What is so fabulous about this book is that it is written backwards. Divided into four parts and four years ('vintages' Torday cheekily calls them), the book starts in 2006 and goes back to 2002. As the book progresses [backwards] we go from Wilberforce's terminal alcohol problem to its origins, spanning work, love, family, friends and [still backwards] his terrible decline. Written in the first person narrative, we witness the terrible confusion, paranoia and self-justification of the alcoholic, though progressively slip backwards to discover another character- a shy, nervous man in quest for origins and a circle in which he can belong. Though this is a serious, heartbreaking subject and story, there is a always a wry sense of humour thoughout the book: it is like watching a man who slips on a banana skin only to die of a broken back.

IMHO this is a wonderful, intense, thought-provoking book. Wilberforce's character starts as a big man, a little arrogant, self-assured, similar to John Lanchester's Tarquin character in the Debt to Pleasure (read review here), though clearly haunted by memory flashes of different times. Little by little we learn to distinguish the man from the drink and discover the genesis of the flshback snippets. After Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (read review here) which was simultaneously funny, bittersweet, moving and dark, Torday conjures up another orginal style and story in a similar clean prose. Very highly recommended -more than that!- and Torday is now on my list of favorite contemporary writers.