A Carnivore's Inquiry [图书] Goodreads
Sabina Murray leapt to the attention of the literary world when she won the prestigious PEN/Faulkner Award for The Caprices , a collection of stories about the Pacific campaign of World War II. In her first novel since Slow Burn , Sabina Murray delivers a seductive literary thriller that delights in its taboo subject.
When we meet Katherine, the winning—and rather disturbing—twenty-three-year-old narrator of A Carnivore’s Inquiry , she has just left Italy and arrived in New York City, but what has propelled her there is a mystery. She soon strikes up an affair with a middle-aged Russian émigré novelist she meets on the subway, and almost immediately moves into his apartment. Katherine’s occasional allusions to a frighteningly eccentric mother and tyrannical father suggest a somberness at the center of her otherwise flippant and sardonic demeanor. Soon restless, she journeys from literary New York to rural Maine, then across the United States and into Mexico, trailed everywhere she goes by a string of murders. As the ritualistic killings begin to pile up, Katherine comforts and inspires herself by meditating on cannibalism in literature, art, and history, and examines subjects as diverse as the Donner Party, the fall of Dante’s Count Ugolino, and the story behind Gericault’s The Raft of the Medusa . Slowly Katherine realizes that at the center of the mysterious deaths lies a bloody truth—that in the beam of a flashlight in the woods, in the scrabbling claws in the cupboard, something is making itself known. As the story races toward its frightening conclusion, Katherine, and the reader, close in on the true reason for her fascination with aberrant, violent behavior.
This is a novel of ideas, a shocking and enlightening modern gothic, and a brilliantly subtle commentary on twenty-first-century consumerism and Western culture’s obsession with new frontiers. Told in highly intelligent prose, A Carnivore’s Inquiry is a sly, unsettling exploration of the questionable appetites that lurk beneath the veneer of North American civilization.
When we meet Katherine, the winning—and rather disturbing—twenty-three-year-old narrator of A Carnivore’s Inquiry , she has just left Italy and arrived in New York City, but what has propelled her there is a mystery. She soon strikes up an affair with a middle-aged Russian émigré novelist she meets on the subway, and almost immediately moves into his apartment. Katherine’s occasional allusions to a frighteningly eccentric mother and tyrannical father suggest a somberness at the center of her otherwise flippant and sardonic demeanor. Soon restless, she journeys from literary New York to rural Maine, then across the United States and into Mexico, trailed everywhere she goes by a string of murders. As the ritualistic killings begin to pile up, Katherine comforts and inspires herself by meditating on cannibalism in literature, art, and history, and examines subjects as diverse as the Donner Party, the fall of Dante’s Count Ugolino, and the story behind Gericault’s The Raft of the Medusa . Slowly Katherine realizes that at the center of the mysterious deaths lies a bloody truth—that in the beam of a flashlight in the woods, in the scrabbling claws in the cupboard, something is making itself known. As the story races toward its frightening conclusion, Katherine, and the reader, close in on the true reason for her fascination with aberrant, violent behavior.
This is a novel of ideas, a shocking and enlightening modern gothic, and a brilliantly subtle commentary on twenty-first-century consumerism and Western culture’s obsession with new frontiers. Told in highly intelligent prose, A Carnivore’s Inquiry is a sly, unsettling exploration of the questionable appetites that lurk beneath the veneer of North American civilization.