Tenderloin
Ratings1
Average rating5
15
Ratings1
Average rating5
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.
Reviews with the most likes.
my parents were butchers, and my life, from a very young age, revolved around meat. beef, pork, chicken, and all its variants. in a working class family, meat felt like a lifeline; without the sanctuary of our butcher shop, i'm unsure as to if we would have gotten any protein beyond tofu and fish. in the past year, the involvement of meat in my life has consumed me: books, documentaries, interviews... so, in light of this, joy sorman has accomplished for me what every book strives to do: instill a sense of being seen & understood.
the obsession over meat & where your food comes from, the yearning to go back to a day where you knew your food, the discomfort in navigating a life outside of this obsession... it felt raw! it felt good! i felt recognized!!! the way sorman describes the veneration of viscera & deploys religious allusions as pim descends more and more into his obsession was so beautiful. not to mention the prose in general was incredibly well-done, and i loved the frantic, long sentences with spiraling metaphors and varying perspectives. the interchange of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, made it feel like we were where pim envisioned himself to be: sliced open, occupying his brain, looking out from his cattle-like eyes.
not to mention the earnest look into class dynamics! pim comparing himself with the slaughterhouse workers, asserting himself as "better" (even when the narration suggests he should have solidarity) + cows as the proletariat of the animal kingdom: laboring and laboring...
this was fantastic, and its style made it lightning-fast to finish & left me wanting more to consume, consume, consume.
