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The Epicure's Lament

Kate Christensen

Paperback | Pages: 351 pages

Rating: 3.73 | 1304 Users | 210 Reviews

Describe Epithetical Books The Epicure's Lament

Title	:	The Epicure's Lament
Author	:	Kate Christensen
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	First Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 351 pages
Published	:	January 25th 2005 by Anchor (first published February 17th 2004)
Categories	:	Fiction. Food and Drink. Food. Literary Fiction. Contemporary. Literature. Novels

Ilustration As Books The Epicure's Lament

For ten years, Hugo Whittier, upper-class scion, former gigolo, failed belle lettriste, has been living a hermit's existence at Waverly, his family's crumbling mansion overlooking the Hudson. He passes the time reading Montaigne and M. F. K. Fisher, cooking himself delicious meals, smoking an endless number of cigarettes, and nursing a grudge against the world. But his older brother, Dennis, has returned, in retreat from an unhappy marriage, and so has his estranged wife, Sonia, and their (she claims) daughter Bellatrix, shattering Hugo's cherished solitude. He's also been told by a doctor that he has the rare Buerger's disease, which means that unless he stops smoking, he will die—all the more reason for Hugo to light up, because his quarrel with life is bitter and an early death is a most attractive prospect.

As Hugo smokes and cooks and sexually schemes and pokes his perverse nose into other people's marriages and business, he records these events as well as his mordant, funny, gorgeously articulated personal history and his thoughts on life and mortality in a series of notebooks. His is one of the most perversely compelling literary personalities to inhabit a novel since John Lanchester's The Debt to Pleasure, and his ancestors include the divinely cracked and eloquent narrators of the works of Nabokov. As snobbish and dislikable as Hugo is, his worldview is so seductively conveyed that even the most resistant readers will be put under his spell. His insinuating voice gets into their heads and under their skin in the most seductive way. And as he prepares what may be his final Christmas feast for family and friends, readers will have to ask, "Isthis the end of Hugo?"

Imagine the book the young hero of the independent film hit Igby Goes Down might write twenty-five years from now, and you'll get an idea of the powerfully peculiar charm of The Epicure's Lament.

Details Books To The Epicure's Lament

Original Title:	The Epicure's Lament
ISBN:	038572098X (ISBN13: 9780385720984)
Edition Language:	English
Characters:	Hugo Whittier

Rating Epithetical Books The Epicure's Lament

Ratings: 3.73 From 1304 Users | 210 Reviews

Article Epithetical Books The Epicure's Lament

As with most 5-star books, it's hard to articulate why I loved this so, so much (just realized my 5-star reviews are the most moronic). There is something about Hugo that is so starkly, unhypocritically human that I felt so much pathos for him as protagonist and not anti-hero. Christensen conveyed his voice almost perfectly. There were a couple moments where I thought his better angels were winning in an unrealistic fashion, but then I realized that human nature also means becoming invested in

ok. The protagonist is a real ass. Just a bad human. And so are the other people around him, something that is explored in elegant detail. Its painful, right up to the end. And then it starts to come together. They become human; they evolve. In the story there is redemption, and insight that leads to reader in the direction of (some) compassion and understanding. For all of that, just a really good read.

I found Kate Christensen through a link to her blog from some long forgotten web-surfing session, and I've been hooked ever since. The way the woman talks about food - I think about and mull it over long after I've read it, which in this day and age of constant sensory overload, is something. This book takes the best of her food writing and combines it with some annoying, contradictory, aggravating people and of course makes me fall in love with all of them. Very recommended.*But Dennis is down

The character of Hugo Whittier has to be one of the great fictional creations, a real nasty piece of work but still strangely likeable. He's a forty-year-old failed poet and essayist whose life gave him enough ill turns--a lousy childhood, a cheating wife--that he's closed himself up in the family estate and decided to smoke himself to death. He loves Montaigne, M.F.K. Fisher, cooking, eating, and sex, but not enough to stay around.When his older brother, a solid, duty-bound type thrown into a

Ugh..I wrote a decently long review and Goodreads didn't save it. Suffice it to say that I thought the writing of this novel was better than average but it lost me at the ending. Also, I'm the type of person who tends to have to like the protagonist in fiction novels and I found the charisma of this man to be too manipulative and even pathetic.Some great things about the main character is that he's a misanthrope and has a dark sort of wit about him. He tends to be brutally honest about

2 1/2. The writing is very good, the level refreshingly complex. But Hugo is so unlikeable and I guess that put me off. He is just not somebody I want to read about. The ending is darkly comic, and maybe the best thing about him. He realizes that the webs he has woven (getting his dirty finger in everyone's pie as the author says) have ensared him and actually he is more interested than he lets on. If there is a sequel I won't read it...

Cantankerous and funny. Every time Kate Christiansen puts a book out, I read it very quickly. My favorite goto for light fare.