The Devil’s LardeR by Jim Crace

Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux,165 pp.; $20

Being Dead, British author Jim Crace’s most recent novel and winner of the 2000 National Book Critics Circle Award, was a quiet and daring story about love that began with the couple’s murder. The paradoxical and grammatically awkward title was highly appropriate for its unassuming but innovative take on death. That novel’s precise, almost sensuous sensibility also comes across in Crace’s newest work, The Devil’s Larder, a collection of 64 short pieces about food that also turn out to be about death, sex, starvation and desire.

Food and all the human rituals and passions associated with its consumption make for compelling and surreal tales that are about much more than what’s for dinner. In a series of vignettes, Crace tells of a mixture that, when consumed, makes one laugh without cause; a condemned man’s last meal as described by a narrator watching the prison guard collect the food requested, which includes drug-laced baked goods; a spontaneous game of “strip fondue” with friends from the office; a mother testing whether she can taste pasta in another person’s mouth—her daughter’s. The Devil’s Larder is a series of creative exercises, a chance for Crace to illuminate these strange but deeply felt moments bit by bit, in simple prose that contrasts starkly with the richness of the world he portrays.

Because these pieces are so brief, The Devil’s Larder lacks the narrative intricacy that made Being Dead so appealing, and some readers might not fully appreciate Crace’s brevity, or the neatness necessary in such short pieces. Taken collectively, the 64 sketches make a convincing argument about food’s surprising significance in human social life, but Crace’s skill is such that this becomes apparent even in the smallest of portions.

–By P. Patty Li

Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood by Oliver Sacks

Published by Knopf, 320 pp.; $20

In Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, Oliver Sacks writes:

As a child I thought that light had form and size, the flower-like shapes of candleflames, like unopened magnolias, the luminous polygons in my uncle’s tungsten bulbs. It was only when Uncle Abe showed me his spinthariscope and I saw the individual sparkles in this that I started to realize that light, all light, came from atoms or molecules which had first been excited and then, returning to their ground state, relinquished their excess energy as visible radiation.

For most of us, experience with physical chemistry is relegated to a few painful memories of high school science—the rest is a mystery and we’re happy to keep it that way. During Sacks’ youth, chemistry was a welcome respite from a less-than-ideal childhood.

Sacks grew up in an affluent Jewish household in London during the World War II—a story in itself—but was sent away to a country boarding school during the peak of the war to avoid the dangers of wartime. Psychologically abused by his headmaster, far from the comforts of home and the love of a fascinating, scientifically-inclined extended family that included doctors, mathematicians, chemists and mining consultants, Sacks sought a sense of security the only way he could—through scientific experimentation.