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Title: The Epicure's Lament by KATE CHRISTENSEN ISBN: 0-7679-1030-3 Publisher: Doubleday Pub. Date: 17 February, 2004 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.75 (8 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: "I set out to detach myself from all human interaction"
Comment: Kate Christensen's In the Drink and Jeremy Thrane were enormously entertaining and portrayed, with a resounding heart and humour, people living on the edge of society. In the Epicure's Lament, she returns with Hugo Whittier - a former gigolo, once part-time drug trafficker and self confessed cynic. Christensen proves, once again, that she can combine rich prose, sparkling dialogue, with astute and detailed characterization. In this wickedly dark comedy, Hugo has been living a hermit like existence in his ancestral home of Waverly on the banks of the Hudson River. Hugo smokes and drinks too much, and when he's diagnosed with Buerger's disease, he throws care to the wind and embarks on a self-destructive and bitter path downward. Here he is, "a decaying forty year old man in his decaying childhood home at the ruined finale of a wasted life."
Hugo's peaceful, solitary existence is disturbed and his life is irrevocably altered when his brother, Dennis, newly estranged from Marie, his wife comes to stay, and Hugo's own wife with whom he has been separated with for ten years, also decides to visit with her daughter Bellatrix. To add insult to injury, in a moment of sudden sexual fury, he embarks on a highly charged affair with Stephanie, the wife of Dennis' best friend. Hugo is obstinate and vicious, and relishes interfering in other people's marriages and businesses; his dinner conversation is designed to provoke and he constantly riles his family with blunt, vituperative and nasty asides. But while taking pleasure in causing trouble, he regularly records his private and provocative thoughts in a type of articulate and eloquent personal diary - a diary that is filled with sadness, melancholy and regret
As Hugo moves steadily towards death, with pain a constant, he ponders on his looks - "an old fashioned haircut, and a shambolic frame," slightly padded with the after effects of many good meals and little exercise. He's wrung out and dried up and where solitude was comforting, there is now a deepening and intensifying "garum gloom." He has reached the end of his tenure in work and life, and midlife is like standing on a high peak looking down at the planes; "it's a congruence of life and death, ashes that you came from and the ones you're heading towards becoming."
Christensen has written an astute study of death and dying, but she also incorporates the themes of family, giving a totally fresh and modern view of the ties that bind people together. As always, Christensen's dialogue shines, her characters are absorbing, and her narrative startles with its sardonic twists and unanticipated turns. Full of word play and mythical jokes, the novel is packed with Hugo's hilarious, and sometimes satiric observations on love, life, family and especially sex. More ambitious and with a far more tightly focused structure than the previous two Christensen novels, The Epicure's Lament is still identifiable as classic "loser lit" and is an unqualified delight to read. (...)
Rating: 5
Summary: when is she going to write another one?
Comment: One of the best novels I've read in ages. I couldn't put it down. Full of energy, insight and thoroughly engaging (in the best sense). I look forward to reading it again.
Rating: 5
Summary: Life according to Hugo Whittier...
Comment: Kate Christensen has grown a lot as a writer. Ever since her first novel, In the Drink, was wrongly categorized as "chick-lit," her subsequent lead characters have been male. I loved In the Drink and Jeremy Thrane and couldn't wait for her next novel. The Epicure's Lament is a darkly funny novel about the philosophies of a forty-year-old cynic.
After various misadventures involving runaways, drug dealing, living as a gigolo and leaving behind his wife and alleged daughter, all Hugo Whittier wants is a life of solitude. He's enjoyed a hermit's existence at Waverly -- an old, historical mansion overlooking the Hudson River -- where he intends to die of Buerger's disease, a condition caused by smoking. But things don't go as planned when his brother separates from his wife and moves in with him. To make matters worse, his estranged wife and daughter also move in. What transpires is a comic situation after another at the full house.
I enjoyed the dark humor. Hugo is one flawed character! You'd love to hate him. He's the proverbial anti-hero. He has an interesting way of looking at life. His philosophies made me laugh out loud at times. Kate Christensen showed a great deal of promise with In the Drink -- and her novels have gotten darker, funnier and more literary. The Epicure's Lament is fine modern literature and I'm officially hooked on this author. I can't wait to pick up her next book.
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Title: The Birth of Venus by Sarah Dunant ISBN: 1400060737 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 17 February, 2004 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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Title: Little Children : A Novel by Tom Perrotta ISBN: 0312315716 Publisher: St. Martin's Press Pub. Date: 01 March, 2004 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: The Annunciation of Francesca Dunn : A Novel by Janis Hallowell ISBN: 0060559195 Publisher: William Morrow Pub. Date: 02 March, 2004 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
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Title: The Last Goodbye by Reed Arvin ISBN: 0060555513 Publisher: HarperCollins Pub. Date: 17 February, 2004 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
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Title: What Was She Thinking?: Notes on a Scandal: A Novel by Zoe Heller ISBN: 0805073337 Publisher: Henry Holt & Company, Inc. Pub. Date: 01 August, 2003 List Price(USD): $23.00 |
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