Ce site utilise des cookies pour fournir nos services, optimiser les performances, pour les analyses, et (si vous n'êtes pas connecté) pour les publicités. En utilisant Librarything, vous reconnaissez avoir lu et compris nos conditions générales d'utilisation et de services. Votre utilisation du site et de ses services vaut acceptation de ces conditions et termes.
Résultats trouvés sur Google Books
Cliquer sur une vignette pour aller sur Google Books.
Tarquin Winot, voluptuary, super-civilized ironist and snob, sets out on a journey of the senses from the Hotel Splendide, Portsmouth, to his cottage in Provence, his spiritual home.With his head newly shaved and his well-thumbed copy of the Mossad Manual of Surveillance Techniques safely stowed, Tarquin elegantly introduces his life, itself a work of art, through the medium of seasonal menus.Poisonously funny and opinionated, Tarquin graces us with accounts of his unjustly celebrated sculptor sibling, his beloved Irish nanny, his adoring parents, their alcoholic Norwegian cook, as well as Tarquin's neighbours in France; and the series of unfortunate accidents that they have unaccountably met with...… (plus d'informations)
The debt to pleasure est un récit à la première personne d'un certain Tarquin Willot, un Anglais ayant entrepris de traverser la Manche pour se rendre dans sa maison en Provence. Tarquin Willot a quelque chose de Humbert Humbert dans sa folie, son goût des mots, son parfait égotisme, sa manière de s'enivrer de sa propre érudition, sa misanthropie. Son obsession ne se fixe pas sur une Lolita) mais sur les plaisirs de la cuisine (le livre est parsemé de différentes recettes). Et John Lanchester, sans être pour autant Nabokov, écrit sacrément bien. Il livre un roman très singulier, intelligent, plein d'esprit, drôle et cynique, sans aucun affect... carrément toxique. Et c'est plutôt jubilatoire. Méfiez-vous, la prochaine fois, que l'on vous invitera à déguster des champignons ! ( )
Sprachlich allein ist das Werk ein Vergnügen, wenn es dem Übersetzer auch nicht gelingt, alles von dieser geschliffenen Prosa ins Deutsche hinüberzuretten. Das wahrhaft erschreckende (und mit anderen Worten: das wahrhaft meisterhafte) an diesem Buch jedoch ist die Art und Weise, in der Winot als Mörder und Zyniker durch und durch sympathisch erscheint: ein besserer Künstler als sein Bruder, ein besserer Koch als seine alkoholisierten Hausangestellten, geistreicheren Konversationspartner als alle seine Bekannten, stets bereit für einen ästhetisch anspruchsvollen Mord. Einen intelligenteren Bösewicht hat die Literaturgeschichte seit dem Vicomte de Valmont nicht gesehen. Und gerade deshalb: ein zutiefst moralisches, sehr modernes und vor allem höchst amüsantes Buch. Appetitlich wie ein Kugelfisch und wirksam wie das Gift in ihm.
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
My German engineer was very argumentative and tiresome. He wouldn't admit that it was certain that there was not a rhinoceros in the room. -- Bertrand Russell, letter to Ottoline Morrell
Dédicace
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
In memory of my father
Premiers mots
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
This is not a conventional cookbook.
Citations
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
I myself have always disliked being called a 'genius'. It is fascinating to notice how quick people have been to intuit and avoid this term. (p. 18)
Notice the difference between the things for which French aristocrats are remembered -- the Vicomte de Chateaubriande's cut of fillet, the Marquis de Bechameil's sauce -- and the inventions for which Britain rembers its defunct eminences: the cardigan, the wellington, the sandwich. (p. 26)
In all memory there is a degree of fallenness; we are all exiles from our own pasts, just as, on looking up from a book, we discover anew our banishment from the bright worlds of imagination and fantasy. (p. 35)
We are all familiar with the after-the-fact tone -- weary, self-justificatory, aggrieved, apologetic -- shared by ship's captains appearing before boards of inquiry to explain how they came to run their vessels aground and by authors composing Forewords. (p. 4)
The gleaming banks of seafood on display at the great Parisian brasseries are like certain policians in that they manage to be impressive without necessarily inspiring absolute confidence. (pp. 31-32)
The Greek myths, like the Old Testament, do have the virtue of describing the way people actually behave. (p. 49)
Personally, canned tomatoes seem to me to be one of the few unequivocal benefits of modern life. (Dentistry, the compact disc.) (p. 51)
It is possible to be over-sentimental about French cooking. At the highest level there is no disputing that it is not so much capable of excesses as that it primarily consists of them. (p. 97)
The word débâcle suggests the going-wrong of an elaborately conceived plan: a disaster that somehow leaves the principal parties not only having lost what they were aware that they were risking, but much more besides, as if an attempt to charm the boss by inviting him to dinner and cooking an ambitious favourite dish of his were to result in the death by poisoning of his wife, loss of one's job, collapse of one's marriage, one's bankruptcy, turn to violent crime and subsequent death in a shoot-out with police -- when all one was worried about was the risk of curdling the hollandaise. (p. 167)
How little we would resent our itches if we took them for what they so often are -- the ambassadors of resurgent life. (p 183)
Derniers mots
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
By the time I got there the murdered couple had gone around the corner onto the main road, leaving behind them a slow cloud of settling dust.
Tarquin Winot, voluptuary, super-civilized ironist and snob, sets out on a journey of the senses from the Hotel Splendide, Portsmouth, to his cottage in Provence, his spiritual home.With his head newly shaved and his well-thumbed copy of the Mossad Manual of Surveillance Techniques safely stowed, Tarquin elegantly introduces his life, itself a work of art, through the medium of seasonal menus.Poisonously funny and opinionated, Tarquin graces us with accounts of his unjustly celebrated sculptor sibling, his beloved Irish nanny, his adoring parents, their alcoholic Norwegian cook, as well as Tarquin's neighbours in France; and the series of unfortunate accidents that they have unaccountably met with...
▾Descriptions provenant de bibliothèques
Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque
▾Description selon les utilisateurs de LibraryThing
Google Books — Chargement...
(3.77)
1
Tarquin Willot a quelque chose de Humbert Humbert dans sa folie, son goût des mots, son parfait égotisme, sa manière de s'enivrer de sa propre érudition, sa misanthropie. Son obsession ne se fixe pas sur une Lolita) mais sur les plaisirs de la cuisine (le livre est parsemé de différentes recettes). Et John Lanchester, sans être pour autant Nabokov, écrit sacrément bien.
Il livre un roman très singulier, intelligent, plein d'esprit, drôle et cynique, sans aucun affect... carrément toxique.
Et c'est plutôt jubilatoire.
Méfiez-vous, la prochaine fois, que l'on vous invitera à déguster des champignons ! (