How unreasonable, the age of reason, especially for an illiterate peasant – although overflowing with imagination and reflection. AK Blakemore’s new novel The glutton might be based on a strand of a fantastical 18th-century real person, but expands into a shocking fairy tale as vivid as a Breughel or a Bosch.

Here is how the book, beyond an anti-hero protagonist, presents itself: “The Great Tarare. The Glutton of Lyon. The Hercules of the Gosier. The Bottomless Man. The beast. Indeed, as Tarare recounts her life of misfortune to her hospital nurse, Sister Perpetué, we learn of her difficult upbringing, who did not hesitate to receive maternal care, a shocking beating, close to death, linked to a betrayal after her first kiss, and a life with a gang of crooks, courtesans and schemers who have no problem using her disgusting hunger as the main act of their traveling show.

France during the revolutionary era The glutton is ruthless, so why wouldn’t the crowds come to admire this young man who devours so much of everything he feeds on? Live Rats is far from the worst – this is not a book for the squeamish. But, of course, hunger is one of our most adaptable metaphors, and Blakemore’s poetic sense (she also publishes poetry) allows Tarare to think powerfully, often with a sharp political edge. For example, he asks: “Who feasts and who starves is entirely a matter of chance – chance is then reified and made sacred, made other than it is, by God, debt and the machines. And whips.

Peasant fatalism is not a bug, but a peculiarity. At the beginning of the book, after a cruel summer, Blakemore writes: “And soon it’s winter again, and everyone thinks that everything will get worse forever, because it certainly won’t get better or stay the same. An immutable law of nature being — as the learned gentlemen of Paris are saying at the moment — flow. His cold eye nevertheless reveals some at least pleasant glimmers, whether out of pity for Tarare or his readers. After all, even Sister Perpetué wonders: “The memoirs of a cannibal… who would want to read such a thing?”

That’s the problem, of course. Tarare’s innocence and horror are inseparable, but it’s hard to deny their attraction, because we hope there might be a why (even if the novel never solves anything easy for us), as we hope that there might be a way out (even if we pretend there isn’t). death, knowing everything we know). Just as Tarare can feel refreshed after some time swimming in a river, we can swim in Blakemore’s magnificent prose, from descriptions like “a dithering of midges” to retorts to a verbose person like “There is no no Sunday for your language.”

And then there is the desire for family, a hunger that Tarare can never quench. He loses his mother; his traveling criminal gang eventually dispersed; even the military ends up becoming the butt of an elaborate international joke. At the time when he was a soldier, after having been arrested for stealing other people’s rations, a “liberal” aide-de-camp who read Rousseau and admitted himself still asserted: “What does a peasant do with his preferences, with his appetites? With distinctive characteristics? A peasant with preferences is a monkey with a planet. A sheep with a porcelain teapot.

The glutton is a book where Pangloss would go to die. Blakemore lifts the misery and loss, if only a little, by resurrecting language – at one point a destitute character only half-jokes: “Perhaps I have learned to speak so prettily in the leisure that my wandering offers me.” The book’s lovely prose requires a dictionary at your side, letting you learn, and here are a few: bocage, smalt, goliard, thimblerig, gleets, doleance, bandog, chine, jugulate, Tophet, mouchard, gurns, flensed, baldaquin , charivari, Upiór. Blakemore is sure to make your coracle float with her diction.

Blakemore is also sure to make you rethink your world and your relationship with it (to this is far from a bad prepositional phrase, right?). At one point, a character suggests, “Looking is a taste of taking.” » How can the reading not be the same? At a critical point in the book’s plot, Tarare’s gang wanders into an already ransacked aristocrat’s mansion. Even torn apart, it is bigger than anything poor Tarare has ever seen. (He doesn’t have Lifestyles of the rich and famous to know his place.) But then the young man who never consumes enough has this revelation: “Perhaps a prerequisite for true beauty is surprise, he thinks: true beauty must appear as whether it had fallen suddenly from the sky, or others come from the depths of the earth – from a place where it shone secretly and invisibly, until you came and saw it…..they are luxurious, indeed – but luxury is the opposite of surprise.

This review was originally published in the California Review of Books.