The Review of Contemporary Fiction
The Devil's Larder by Jim CracePaul Maliszewski
Jim Crace. The Devil’s Larder. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001. 165 pp. $20.00.
The Devil’s Larder is a collection of sixty-four very short stories-the longest several pages, the shortest just two words-having to do with cooking and eating all sorts of food, from extravagant dishes to ordinary cans. Crace, the author of six novels, including Quarantine and Being Dead, sets his stories in an unnamed village. Many of the stories arise from the village’s collective identity as a culturally distinct place beset by outsiders. Villagers versus those tourists, those university students, and those rich people just driving through are conflicts that play out in a number of stories told from the villagers’ point of view. (When a chef intentionally starts serving plates of bad mussels to visiting troublemakers, the locals come to watch for sport.) Crace’s language, always precise and fascinated with naming things, has in this book relaxed somewhat. Crace writes as if he’s recording the oral legends of a place we’ve never been. The narrator in one story says that the devil is seen at night, in the woods, pulling mushrooms from his sack and planting them in the ground. It’s an old story, seeming like a lost work of Grimm, something children somewhere are told before bed. At the same time, the details are contemporary-one recent sighting was by people piling out of a bar-and the narrator’s voice can be casual, relating his own supernatural encounter as no big deal: “So I was curious when he and I crossed paths.” There are many courses here, each prepared superbly, but like any feast, there are a few tastes that repeat from story to story. Crace is interested in our appetites and our ability or inability to restrain them. Feelings of satisfaction here are never far from feelings of discontent, as desire can quickly become disgust. [Paul Maliszewski]