Helpful Score: 1
Very disturbing but it keeps you in it's grips waiting to see what will ultimately happen.
From Library Journal
Croatian journalist and novelist Drakuli'c (Cafe Europa, LJ 3/15/97) makes her third venture into fiction with a paperback original described by its publisher as likely to be "very controversial." Possible, indeed, considering that the book consists of narrator Tereza, a Polish doctoral candidate, detailing graphically how she spent much of her research time in New York planning and carrying out the murder, dismemberment, and cannibalization of her married lover. As a professional academic, Tereza is skilled at defending theses: she presents her motivation and reasoning in logical, even dry, locutions. But this young lady makes the Glenn Close character in Fatal Attraction seem mildly eccentric. For those with strong constitutions, the book offers some wry commentary on modern mores and the degrees of separation inhibiting male-female communication; however, this is for a very specialized readership.?Starr E. Smith, Marymount Univ. Lib., Arlington, Va.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The New York Times Book Review, James Polk
The Croatian novelist and journalist Slavenka Drakulic begins The Taste of a Man with excess and then goes way beyond it. Tereza is a Polish graduate student who has come to New York to research her doctoral dissertation. But once she's met Jose, a Brazilian anthropologist working on a book about cannibalism, these academic pursuits are sacrificed to her obsessive pursuit of him--not only sexually but also to achieve "absolute union."
Croatian journalist and novelist Drakuli'c (Cafe Europa, LJ 3/15/97) makes her third venture into fiction with a paperback original described by its publisher as likely to be "very controversial." Possible, indeed, considering that the book consists of narrator Tereza, a Polish doctoral candidate, detailing graphically how she spent much of her research time in New York planning and carrying out the murder, dismemberment, and cannibalization of her married lover. As a professional academic, Tereza is skilled at defending theses: she presents her motivation and reasoning in logical, even dry, locutions. But this young lady makes the Glenn Close character in Fatal Attraction seem mildly eccentric. For those with strong constitutions, the book offers some wry commentary on modern mores and the degrees of separation inhibiting male-female communication; however, this is for a very specialized readership.?Starr E. Smith, Marymount Univ. Lib., Arlington, Va.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The New York Times Book Review, James Polk
The Croatian novelist and journalist Slavenka Drakulic begins The Taste of a Man with excess and then goes way beyond it. Tereza is a Polish graduate student who has come to New York to research her doctoral dissertation. But once she's met Jose, a Brazilian anthropologist working on a book about cannibalism, these academic pursuits are sacrificed to her obsessive pursuit of him--not only sexually but also to achieve "absolute union."
