Synopsis
Can killing be an act of love? Hypnotic, gruesome, and exultant, Joy Sorman’s macabre ballet whirls from industrial slaughterhouses to the boutique butcher shops of Paris.
Pim is a delicate youth―stringy, solemn, and prone to bouts of unexplained weeping. When he enrolls in trade school as an apprentice butcher, his mentors have low expectations, but his lanky body conceals a peculiar flame: a passionate devotion to animals. In an industry that strives to distance the chopping block from the dinner plate, his ardor might seem like a handicap, but Pim rises through the knife-wielding ranks with a barely-tethered zeal. He scours blood from floor mats and stacks carcasses in the cold room by day. By night he tries to slake his appetites: at the table, over boudin sausage and steak tartare, and in bed, with women whose flanks, ribs, and haunches he maps as they undress each other.
Pim’s professional successes mount but his cravings gnaw. In the library he teases out histories, like the blood-drinking forerunners to vampirism or the Medieval trial of a killer pig, sentenced to death by hanging. Meat crowds his waking thoughts. Even as he carves ripe flesh from exquisite bone, he labors to close the gap between man and beast―to be seen, understood, even loved, by a primordial mind. Will this ravenous obsession yield to madness, or to ecstasy?
With shades of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Joy Sorman’s Tenderloin is an ethical foray, fever dream, and paean to an ageless hunger. Vegetarians and carnivores alike are invited to feast at this sumptuous literary table. After all, we are what we eat.
Review
First of all, I love that Goodreads classifies Tenderloin as "Weird Fiction". I struggled to classify it in my own collection, but I eventually decided it falls under "Horror". The gruesome descriptions of meat and Pim's mindset toward the end are what ultimately did it for me. I spent much of this story debating if I am supposed to leave as a vegan or a cannibal and that alone made this novel fantastically horrific.
Tenderloin is a quick read that will take you on a journey of understanding not only the literal process of meat processing, but the spiritual side of it as well. Tenderloin gets you thinking not only about how humanity began eating meat, but how the process has changed over time and what that means.
If you need something weird on your plate that you can't get out of your mind, and you don't mind visual descriptions of meat, this book is for you!
Thank you, LibraryThing, for a copy of Tenderloin!
Dates read: Apr 19, 2024 - Apr 19, 2024