Helpful Score: 1
Instead of writing a proper review of this tremendously fun book--of which I am definitely hanging onto my Penguin UK paperback (white cover with hundreds of red blood vessels vining & branching all over it)--I'm going to just list all my notes, on the scraps of paper I stuck in the book. The notes are sort of in order by page #, so you may (or probably may not) get some sense of the story flow from the notes as they progress. Where there were character names & potential plot giveaways I put X or Y.
--GoyaYes I adore this silly book. I like cannibal stuff. Yes indeedy yes I do.
--Melville
--"'Sex is vulgar. Vulgarity is sex's best quality.'"
--Salome (head on platter)
--[female sign] hero: "I prefer eating closer to my species."
--eating X's cheeks
--Indians threatening to eat white people, in Fenimore Cooper
--cannibal duo in Lyon
--wordplay: cannibas
--" 'I didn't feel bad about killing the fish because I ate it.' Y seemed very proud. 'I was living in nature, you know.' "
--Silence of the Lambs DVD
--"I'd made peace with the fact that I have a hard time saying no to myself."
--Hansel & Gretel
--Donner Party (duh...)
--The Raft of the Medusa --> Gericault used severed limbs of dead criminals used as models --> "G. used the bizarre and sensational as inspiration for his monumental works of art. This is the job of the Romantic." --> more on G, Delacroix, Goya...
--Dali's "Autumn Cannibalism"
--cannibals in New Mexico
--Malcolm Lowry, Cuernavaca, great names of volcanoes
--eating hearts
--rumors about Diego Rivera (Papua New GUinea?)
--the Fore who eat brains, get kuru (grand tour!)
--2 kinds of paternity: Abraham/Isaac vs. Oedipus/Laius
--great long quote about Donner Party, her identification with the ones who survived and made it to Sunny California, their hunger, their "little void always threatening to overwhelm"
--Fiona Webster
Helpful Score: 1
unabridged
